I know for a fact you can image your drive to a firewire disk, and even boot from it. I would reccomend you clone your boot drive to a FireWire disk (do a google search for Carbon Copy Cloner) and use the internal IDE drive to play with Linux. (After all, I doubt you want to recompile the kernel to be able to boot from a firewire device... let's let apple support what it helped create, eh? [FireWire in this case])
Simple soloution: game on a laptop.
No, I'm not kidding. My laptop has the biggest screen and best graphics of any of my 11 computers. If I want to game on the go, I just throw my trusty optical mouse into the laptop bag, and go. Hell, I started up a game of Q3A with a friend inside another friend's car once! Talk about portable...
This is so true... the last time I had a LAN party, everyone showed up and _didn't have the damn game installed!_ I had to walk three people through installing and updating the game, and by the time that was done, we got to play for all of ten minutes.
I'd rather play over the internet anyway.
Hmmmm... very interesting. It's been too long since I've read the spec papers... I've forgotten so much of this stuff.
My interest in this isn't academic... I want to know if the controller on one of my mainboards will work with drive... if so, I wasted money buying a board with ATA133 onboard.
Armed with this new information, I'm going to try this drive in the same system I'd thought it couldn't work with... thanks.
D'oh, forgot to reach for those docs... I was working on faulty memory. So, hypothetically, I could use an ATA133 drive on an older ATA100 controller that's been firmware upgraded to support LBA48? (forgive my ignorence, but what was the previous standard? LBA32?)
Actually, ATA133 excists because there's a fault in the IDE address scheme, and an ATA133 drive of any capacity larger then 132GB (I believe that's the limit... it might be 125) cannot be used in an older system, as the ATA subsystem will try to address the wrong part of the disk, leading to corruption. I learned this the hard way.
My concern isn't speed... I have yet to see any hard drive sustain anything higher then about 50MB/sec... I just wonder if these adaptor gizmos use the ATA133 addressing scheme. If not... I have a problem.
A while back I went gung-ho and bought the 160GB ATA133 Maxtor hard drive... does anyone know if those little parallel/serial ATA adaptors work with ATA133 devices, or are they only for ATA100 and older standards? I'd hate to have to keep using an actual standard ATA133 controller card for that drive...
I agree... I've used multiple IDE / IDE RAID controllers in one system. It's given me nothing but headaches. The BIOSs just don't handle the IRQ sharing elegantly enough for it. SATA is going to be a godsend for those of us who want to hook up more than 2/4 IDE devices in a single system.
Speaking as someone who just purchsed a similar model (sans the DVD-R/W drive) I'd just like to point out that my main reasons for buying this model were *not* "Ooh, shiny! Me Want!" It was a combonation of the huge screen, acceptable price (compared to the $4,000 a comperable G4 Powerbook cost.... ouch) And the fact that I've always had good luck with sony products. I know full well that Sony is a member of "the evil **AA's", but you know what I do because of that? I don't buy/go to/listen to music or movies that are on the Sony labels. Very simple. I like Sony's hardware (they invented the freakin' VCR, for crying out loud!)but am not a fan the RIAA or MPAA... why try to bankrupt Sony's hardware devision? They make _killer_ toys.
Just so you know... I wasn't trolling, just blowing off some steam. And let me toss a few examples your way... I type a one line IM message... in the time it takes to appear and be ready to send and the rainbow disk cursor goes away, I could have gone and made a sandwich. Shitty IM client, you say? More than likely. How about something closer to home... Mail.app, for one. I like it as an email client, but it's HTML rendering when images are imbedded... painfully slow.
If you don't have these kind of speed problems, I'd be delighted to find out the tricks you've used to boost OSX in the ass and make it responsive enough to use it as heavily as it's capable of. If you haven't tweaked anything, I'd say yes, your machines must have a super-hidden ability, because mine's simply not that fast. Well, unless I reboot into OS9... but that doesn't happen very often, fast or not.
I wholeheartedly agree. I haven't been a mac user for long (bought a G3 600MHz iMac seven months ago) but since I got it, it's become my main machine. However, it's one of the most unresponsive machines I own... and I have a 233MHz machine running at 180MHz (don't ask) a Performa 475 (a 68k machine!) and a 486... yes, the iMac feels slower than it's 68k cousin. I'm able to make a side-by-side comparison between my iMac and my windows 2000 pro machine... it scares me. Win2k box: PII 450MHz, 128MB RAM. iMac: G3 600MHz, 256MB RAM. I love my mac, I really do... but 20 seconds to switch windows (in the same app, no less!) is absoloutely intolerable. Apple's attempt to resolve this? Leave users like me out in the cold... Quartz Extreme (the first real speedup of OSX since 10.1) requres a graphics chipset not in my machine... and since it's an iMac (I wanted a G4, but I couldn't afford it) I can't upgrade the graphics. So the speedups in 10.2's QE will help me not at all.
Just my two cents. But, you should know, slow as a 68k machine or not, I still use it as my main machine... out of all nine of my boxes.
I know where you're coming from... I've used macs in the past, but I just recently got my first (a G3 600MHz iMac) because OSX was just too tempting to pass up... Mac and UNIX, who'd have thunk it? Since I got it, it's been a superbly stable and powerful machine... using OSX is like using my BeOS machine, only about five times slower (the Be machine is a pentium 233 with 64MB RAM, and the iMac is 600MHz with 256MB RAM... go figure) My only issue with OSX is that it's _slow_.... and yes, I have the 10.1 update. Resizing a window should _not_ take three seconds. But it's blown away any uptime I've ever had with windows... 27 Days under actual usage amazes me. I used to fantisize about faster X86 hardware, but now all I really want is the dual-CPU G4.
Am I a convert? Maybe... if Apple wants to send me a dual G4 "sample" model... I'd use it as my primary machine, absoloutlely. But not the iMac... still too slow to do everything I need to do.
I'm a mac fan (not a fanatic yet, but give me a few years!) because I like how it feels to use it... I like that when I sit down, I'm ready to go. I still use windows, and I still use (and love) BeOS, but I'm slowly being drawn over...
This reminds me of how much I use sound as a troubleshooting tool... I'm probably I'm not the only geek to use the sound of fans, floppy drives and hard disks (not to mention IOMega's Zip drives' infamous "click of death") as a general indicator of their health. Does anyone else use sound as a general health indicator for their systems? If so, how do you do it?
As Florian mentioned, my CPU fan is also an indicator of the current load. Is this a common occurance? Anyone else familiar with it?
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I know for a fact you can image your drive to a firewire disk, and even boot from it. I would reccomend you clone your boot drive to a FireWire disk (do a google search for Carbon Copy Cloner) and use the internal IDE drive to play with Linux. (After all, I doubt you want to recompile the kernel to be able to boot from a firewire device... let's let apple support what it helped create, eh? [FireWire in this case])
Heh... how much of that 500MB is being used for swap? 128MB? And which of the linux GUIs can possibly run on such crippled hardware?
(sigh) You're not alone...
Do what I did... buy a used older mac from a stupid user (I got a Performa 475 for five bucks!) and get the decal they never bothered to use. (grin)
Simple soloution: game on a laptop. No, I'm not kidding. My laptop has the biggest screen and best graphics of any of my 11 computers. If I want to game on the go, I just throw my trusty optical mouse into the laptop bag, and go. Hell, I started up a game of Q3A with a friend inside another friend's car once! Talk about portable...
This is so true... the last time I had a LAN party, everyone showed up and _didn't have the damn game installed!_ I had to walk three people through installing and updating the game, and by the time that was done, we got to play for all of ten minutes. I'd rather play over the internet anyway.
Hmmmm... very interesting. It's been too long since I've read the spec papers... I've forgotten so much of this stuff.
My interest in this isn't academic... I want to know if the controller on one of my mainboards will work with drive... if so, I wasted money buying a board with ATA133 onboard.
Armed with this new information, I'm going to try this drive in the same system I'd thought it couldn't work with... thanks.
D'oh, forgot to reach for those docs... I was working on faulty memory. So, hypothetically, I could use an ATA133 drive on an older ATA100 controller that's been firmware upgraded to support LBA48? (forgive my ignorence, but what was the previous standard? LBA32?)
Actually, ATA133 excists because there's a fault in the IDE address scheme, and an ATA133 drive of any capacity larger then 132GB (I believe that's the limit... it might be 125) cannot be used in an older system, as the ATA subsystem will try to address the wrong part of the disk, leading to corruption. I learned this the hard way. My concern isn't speed... I have yet to see any hard drive sustain anything higher then about 50MB/sec... I just wonder if these adaptor gizmos use the ATA133 addressing scheme. If not... I have a problem.
A while back I went gung-ho and bought the 160GB ATA133 Maxtor hard drive... does anyone know if those little parallel/serial ATA adaptors work with ATA133 devices, or are they only for ATA100 and older standards? I'd hate to have to keep using an actual standard ATA133 controller card for that drive...
I agree... I've used multiple IDE / IDE RAID controllers in one system. It's given me nothing but headaches. The BIOSs just don't handle the IRQ sharing elegantly enough for it. SATA is going to be a godsend for those of us who want to hook up more than 2/4 IDE devices in a single system.
LOL! Please dear god, someone mod parent up as funny! Dammit, no mod points... :(
Speaking as someone who just purchsed a similar model (sans the DVD-R/W drive) I'd just like to point out that my main reasons for buying this model were *not* "Ooh, shiny! Me Want!" It was a combonation of the huge screen, acceptable price (compared to the $4,000 a comperable G4 Powerbook cost.... ouch) And the fact that I've always had good luck with sony products. I know full well that Sony is a member of "the evil **AA's", but you know what I do because of that? I don't buy/go to/listen to music or movies that are on the Sony labels. Very simple. I like Sony's hardware (they invented the freakin' VCR, for crying out loud!)but am not a fan the RIAA or MPAA... why try to bankrupt Sony's hardware devision? They make _killer_ toys.
oh well, just my two cents.
Just so you know... I wasn't trolling, just blowing off some steam. And let me toss a few examples your way... I type a one line IM message... in the time it takes to appear and be ready to send and the rainbow disk cursor goes away, I could have gone and made a sandwich. Shitty IM client, you say? More than likely. How about something closer to home... Mail.app, for one. I like it as an email client, but it's HTML rendering when images are imbedded... painfully slow.
If you don't have these kind of speed problems, I'd be delighted to find out the tricks you've used to boost OSX in the ass and make it responsive enough to use it as heavily as it's capable of. If you haven't tweaked anything, I'd say yes, your machines must have a super-hidden ability, because mine's simply not that fast. Well, unless I reboot into OS9... but that doesn't happen very often, fast or not.
I wholeheartedly agree. I haven't been a mac user for long (bought a G3 600MHz iMac seven months ago) but since I got it, it's become my main machine. However, it's one of the most unresponsive machines I own... and I have a 233MHz machine running at 180MHz (don't ask) a Performa 475 (a 68k machine!) and a 486... yes, the iMac feels slower than it's 68k cousin. I'm able to make a side-by-side comparison between my iMac and my windows 2000 pro machine... it scares me. Win2k box: PII 450MHz, 128MB RAM. iMac: G3 600MHz, 256MB RAM. I love my mac, I really do... but 20 seconds to switch windows (in the same app, no less!) is absoloutely intolerable. Apple's attempt to resolve this? Leave users like me out in the cold... Quartz Extreme (the first real speedup of OSX since 10.1) requres a graphics chipset not in my machine... and since it's an iMac (I wanted a G4, but I couldn't afford it) I can't upgrade the graphics. So the speedups in 10.2's QE will help me not at all.
Just my two cents. But, you should know, slow as a 68k machine or not, I still use it as my main machine... out of all nine of my boxes.
BOO! BSD is BAD! j/k
I know where you're coming from... I've used macs in the past, but I just recently got my first (a G3 600MHz iMac) because OSX was just too tempting to pass up... Mac and UNIX, who'd have thunk it? Since I got it, it's been a superbly stable and powerful machine... using OSX is like using my BeOS machine, only about five times slower (the Be machine is a pentium 233 with 64MB RAM, and the iMac is 600MHz with 256MB RAM... go figure) My only issue with OSX is that it's _slow_.... and yes, I have the 10.1 update. Resizing a window should _not_ take three seconds. But it's blown away any uptime I've ever had with windows... 27 Days under actual usage amazes me. I used to fantisize about faster X86 hardware, but now all I really want is the dual-CPU G4.
Am I a convert? Maybe... if Apple wants to send me a dual G4 "sample" model... I'd use it as my primary machine, absoloutlely. But not the iMac... still too slow to do everything I need to do.
I'm a mac fan (not a fanatic yet, but give me a few years!) because I like how it feels to use it... I like that when I sit down, I'm ready to go. I still use windows, and I still use (and love) BeOS, but I'm slowly being drawn over...
You laugh... I was playing Quake 3 Arena with a friend... let's just say that now she _really_ loves my Dreamcast. True story, I swear.
This reminds me of how much I use sound as a troubleshooting tool... I'm probably I'm not the only geek to use the sound of fans, floppy drives and hard disks (not to mention IOMega's Zip drives' infamous "click of death") as a general indicator of their health. Does anyone else use sound as a general health indicator for their systems? If so, how do you do it?
As Florian mentioned, my CPU fan is also an indicator of the current load. Is this a common occurance? Anyone else familiar with it?