Upgrading a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet

To upgrade your Powerbook G3 Wallstreet to work in modern times, you will need the following items. OS X 10.4.1 Tiger, XPACTO 4 so you can install OS X 10.4.1 Tiger and two 256 MB low profile 100 pin SO-DIMM memory modules. This will make your computer be able to handle the OS X 10.4.1 Tiger operating system as well as the programs you will be running on your Wallstreet.

The G3 Wallstreet shipped with 32 MB of ram and a 2 GB hard drive, this is a serious problem by today's standards and very slow. So you are going to have to upgrade this. If you have a 233 MHZ Wallstreet do not even bother upgrading it because that model had no L2 Cache, making it considerably slower then the other G3 Wallstreets available at the time.

To upgrade the ram, you are going to have to take off the keyboard. You there are two slots on either side of the keyboard, you will need to insert your fingers and find the clips underneath the keyboard. Pull the clips back towards you, the keyboard will slide up and then you can remove it. This will expose the heatsink and the processor card. To remove the heatsink use a small phillips head screw driver. Pry out the processor card gently of your G3 Wallstreet and then pop out those two old ram chips. Slide in your two 256 100 pin SO-DIMM memory modules and then pop the processor card back into place.

You can easily buy a super drive that slides into one of the expansion slots, or you can just buy a hard drive and pop that in when you replace the RAM. The next thing you are going to want to do is install Tiger, make sure to download XPACTO 4 or you will not be able to run OS X 10.4.1 Tiger. These upgrades will make your G3 Wallstreet a fairly viable lap top computer. If you don't have an airport card go run out and get one for this model, and you got yourself a fairly modern lap top for a cheap price.

In conclusion, with the right upgrades the G3 Wallstreet can be made into a good computer. I picked up mine for $5 dollars on EBay, but most of them run around $15-$25 dollars, not bad for a pretty decent lap top computer with the right upgrades don't you say?