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That's certainly not helpful if you want to run Windows, since the windows drivers are buried in this bootcamp nonsense. Could anyone please point me to a separate download location for drivers for e.g. the camera in a polycarbonate 24" iMac?

You can likely use the Freeware (oops, now it's $20, but still worth it!), Pacifist, to extract the iSight Driver from the Bootcamp 1.2 or greater .pkg file (assuming you want Vista or later Windows-Support). It should be the same camera as all of the Polycarbonate iMacs, and in fact, all iMacs up to and including the Late 2009 model.

You can simply download an older version of quicktime, like 7.3.x, and use the package extractor Pacifist to install the older version. I had issues with the update, and went back this way. Totally fixed the problems.

"Since I upgraded to 10.4.8, Safari crashes on me about once a week. Forum advice was to run "repair permissions", I did but it didn't help. "

That seems to be the advice given for everything by some people. I'm not sure why anyone should think it would help in this case or many others.

I suppose you could try reinstalling the application after getting it off the install disc with Pacifist:

http://www.charlessoft.com/

before doing that you might also try removing Safari's preference file: com.apple.Safari.plist from the "Preferences" directory in your Home library, so that a new one is generated, in case there's a corruption in that causing problems. All this, again, is unspecific advice, but at least it's not Voodoo.

You might also like to try the Camino browser. That also uses Mozilla's Gecko engine, but has far better integration with the platform. It also uses a Safari-style bookmark manager:

http://www.caminobrowser.org/

The fan only spins up, however, once the internal temperature hits a certain threshold, which is probably why you haven't noticed it's there. My Rev. A 12" PowerBook fan runs pretty much constantly.

No longer! Download Silent Night, and use Pacifist to install it. Then reset the PRAM by holding CMD-Opt-P-R when booting until it chimes twice.

Silent Night is just a package containing the original fan drivers for the Rev. A 12" PowerBook. The only real difference is the fan-on/fan-off temperatures, which are significantly higher than the existing drivers. Unfortunately, installing the package alone never seems to work, but using Pacifist does. Resetting the PRAM seems to be necessary, too, though I couldn't explain why.

I've been using this method ever since the update that changed the fan temperatures, without any trouble. The case does get much warmer, of course, but unless you're constantly running a full load, it's unlikely to get unbearably hot.

Right (or control)-click on the .pkg file and choose 'Show Package Contents' from the contextual menu.

And? If you wanted to offer semi-useful advice you would have at least mentioned something like Pacifist. You're welcome to instead run down all the step required to manually get around the developer's stupidity in using a .pkg, but that doesn't fix the problem. Why should I have to jump through these hoops when I simply want to play a bloody video? Does the developer further expect me to pay for these hassles when it's much easier to drag the offending .wmv file to the trash? As with .swf, I find I can live nicely without file formats that like to jerk me around. As I said, there must be something about involving Windows that just makes everything so mind-numbingly senseless.

From what the parent said, I think Pacifist is more like an extraction utility to isolate and use parts of a package... think of Microsoft's CAB file format. Please, Mac people, correct me if I'm wrong (which is very probable!)

Also, try the Pacifist site for more info.

1)
Download BootCD which is an app to create a BootCD from a current working installation. This will give you at least a working Finder and BSD subsystem with which you can hack around with.

2)
If that isn't easy enough, the following will blow your boots off:


* The T key forces the PowerBook (FireWire) (and reportedly the Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics), though I was unable to verify that on my machine) to start up in FireWire Target Disk Mode, which is essentially the modern equivalent of SCSI Disk Mode and enables a PowerBook (FireWire) to act as a FireWire-accessible hard disk for another Macintosh.

Too many options! :)

Don't know if anyone else got caught by this, but note that only iPhoto 4.0 - which can only be obtained in Apple's iLife bundle - is subject to the update

The latest version of iPhoto that comes free with MacOS X (even 10.3 a.k.a. Panther) is version 2.0. The update installer refuses to install the update if you have this version, and forcing the update using something like Pacifist makes iPhoto unworkable.

Being as I run server and Garage band wont install on server I have to manually update my installations via pacifist. The disadvantage as it can be a pain to update things, the advantage is that I get to see exactly what is being updated.

In this case it is all the spplication itself. The original Garage band.app was 53.3MB the replacement app is 42MB.
The AECore framework drops from 1.5MB to 1.4MB
DfSearchEngine Wrapper Framework is almost halved in size from 360KB to 195.1KB
LoopCore shrinks from 1.1MB to 868.1KB
Where the largets difference is in the application resources ( button images and controls and their ilk as well as localization files) It drops from 39.1MB to 27.9MB.

Download Coctail to once in a while optimize your system.

An update "prebinds" a lot of files and your system performs periodical maintenance tasks (the famed "cron scripts"). If you're interested in what that means, browse through Apple's support section. If not, just download Coctail and periodically do your own maintenance.

You'll find all you want to do under the "System" icon. Three tabs will interest you: Prebinding, Scripts and Caches. All those tasks take a couple of minutes and you'll need your administrator password to actually perform them.

Another thing: you'll need to have BSD installed. This you find on your original Mac OS X Install disks. Normally you'll have that on your system, but Coctail will advise you if it doesn't find the BSD system in place.

A nice utility to just install the BSD package without going through the whole install process is Pacifist.

Startup Pacifist, insert the first Mac OS X Install disk and in Pacifist, click on the big button saying "Open Mac OS X Install Packages" (which will only be enabled if the install disk is inserted). From there on, browse through the package list, select the BSD package and choose "Install" from the options...

I know, a bit of work, but it is worth your while.

Try BootCD from CharlesSoft.

For Jaguar
For Puma

Try BootCD from CharlesSoft.

For Jaguar
For Puma