01/20/07

Playing with the 170:

I got back from Miami late last night, and spent the better part of today loading my 170 so it'll be more useful and fun on the road. Basically I set it up with the same set of apps as my IIsi minus the internet stuff. The PowerBook came with 7.5.3 installed on the 80MB hard drive and I previously mentioned that I was considering downgrading it to 7.1. However after cleaning up the unnecessary extensions and so on, it actually ended up being leaner than I thought it would be. It's no System 6 of course, but it's currently using only 1.5MB of memory, leaving me with plenty for anything else. Lazy person that I am, I decided to forgo the hassle of creating the 7.1 disk images and let 7.5.3 remain.

luddite mentioned on his blog that I was likely benchmarking while flying, and he wasn't far off! =) The only thing keeping me from it was not having Speedometer installed on the 170 during the week, so I couldn't actually do any testing until today. The processor came in at 0.399, with the FPU at 3.050. The graphics score is pretty meaningless because the other machines were tested in 8-bit mode, while of course the 170 was only tested in 1-bit. I do have a score for the IIcx's Toby card in 1-bit mode, and it was 0.252 vs. the 170's 0.205. So it appears that the 170's graphics fared a little worse. Interesting is the high FPU score for the 170, but everything is kind of suspect because the other scores were taken under System 7.1. Benchmarks are pretty bogus anyway, but overall the 170 feels pretty close in performance to the IIsi, although a little slower in screen drawing.

Also, since I've been home I've taken a few more photos. Here is my IIsi, a clean little machine, with just a hint of yellowing on the top around whatever monitor used to sit on it during its younger years. Here I have the top of the machine removed, and the Apple NB Ethernet card from the IIcx is installed in the Nubus adapter. The adapter also provides the IIsi with a 68882 coprocessor. The 40MB Quantum drive is straight out of my IIcx. This was taken with the Nubus adapter removed, revealing 20MHz of '030 goodness underneath. Unfortunately it's soldered, which isn't nearly as cool as the gold topped socketed processor of my IIcx! =)

Finally, here is my PowerBook 170, in great shape and running ClarisWorks 1.0!