Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks October 2002

Well I ordered and installed Jaguar (OS 10.2). It's a lot faster than the old version (10.1.5) that I was running, but it's all the things Apple manages to break every time they update the System that are painful. Yes, everything from scanner drivers to card readers and printers may need new drivers. This may sound funny to the end users, but it's not very funny to the poor folks who have to spend thousands of dollars making their product work again. What's worse is that Apple often makes a tiny change at the last minute that creates problems with software that worked fine on all the beta releases. Nikon has taken the easy way, they don't start working on it until Apple releases the final golden master. This means an update is one to three months away for their software.

All in all the software looks and feels pretty good, but it needs a few patches to fix the bugs that Jaguar introduced. Once those bugs are killed, we should really have a very stable operating system.

The new Macs that Apple introduced in August have all the features we have been asking for. I noticed that it takes Apple a while to get the message, but they do get it. The new mirrored door models of the G4 tower come with two full-size, front-loading drive bays. This means you can have two CD-ROM drives or even two DVD drives in those bays. This may not mean a whole lot to most users, but to the people that create CD-ROMs and DVD/CD-RW disks this is a wonderful thing. It means I can make a master and not use up hard drive space with an image file of the master as I make copies.

One drawback of the new tower machines is that the fan noise is pretty loud. This is due to the multiple fans inside the case. These are so loud, that several people are building boxes to muffle the fan noise. So if your computer room's noise level is low, you may want to wait and see if Apple finds a way to quiet the fans on the next models.

Good features returning to the G4 tower: audio line in, audio line out. Apple did away with this for a while and everyone had to buy special audio adapters to connect microphones. These ports may be old hat in the digital world, but there's still lots of analog sound out there.

Many customers and PMUG members are asking about adding a FireWire card to their old beige Macintosh. There is nothing wrong with doing that and many FW cards will work with System 8.6 or above. The biggest thing they do not understand is that because it's an add-on card, you will not be able to boot your computer from a FireWire drive attached to the card. In order for the computer to see the FW hard drive at all, it must read the drivers for the card from another source. As you can see, it just can't work with older computers. Newer computers have the instruction to see FireWire drives already built in.

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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