Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks October 2003

The Airport card in the 12.1-inch PowerBook can work its way loose over a period of time and cause a kernel panic. So if you are the proud owner of one of these machines and start having problems, you might very well want to remove your battery and re-seat the card.

Hard drive cases with FireWire ports are pretty easy to find now. However, it still pays to get ones that have Oxford 911 chip sets in them. This chip set is the only one that I have not had problems with. Many times people buy an el-cheapo drive case, and it doesn’t work with the drive they want to put into it. The case maker blames the drive; the drive maker blames the case maker’s chip set.

The new G5 Macintoshes are now shipping; at least the lower Mhz units are. With them, like any new box, comes the mix of problems. Virtual PC will not function for now and needs an update. I’m sure many other bugs will be found and removed between now and the first of December when the assembly lines will be able to keep up with demand. Like any new products, there will be some leading edge oops keeping the end users looking for answers. Some people see these machines to be the be all, end all, do all. Others will understand that faster ones are always on the way. Speaking of the new machines: if you want some of the new features you will have to get the 1.8Ghz or higher model. The 1.6GHz model does not have the new PCI-x slots and only comes with four RAM slots. Now the RAM slots may not be that big of a deal, but the PCI-x slots may come in handy depending on what vendors are doing with the faster slots.

Canon appears to be ready to release some new printers. These are the consumer-level photo printers and are supposed to be far better than anything Canon currently offers. My only fear is that they will charge way too much for the ink.

Speaking of printer ink, everyone appears to think their ink is worth more than the printer. Well it is! In fact, buying two sets of refills for one of the $100 models will basically double the price of those printers. Yes, I understand they don’t make any money on the printers; however pillaging the consumer is not going to get them any brownie points. I suggest everyone email the printer folks and let them know they are stepping over the line on pricing. The cartridges you’re paying $35 for only cost $2 to manufacture.

Sonnet announced the Aria 802.11g PC card adapter to ship later this month. You can plug an Apple 802.11g card into this adapter and use it in an older computer that the newer cards will not work in, such as a Ti-Book. List price is $79.99 and OS X 10.2.6/Airport 3.1 or later is required, as well as a Cardbus slot PowerBook G3 or G4.

Apple says “No” to Macworld Expo in Boston. IDG had no sooner announced the trade show was to be in Boston when Apple made it plain they would not be there. I thought Apple had made it quite plain that from now on there will be only one Expo in the US, and that one was to be in San Francisco.

SOFTWARE NOTES
For those of you waiting for a new version of RealPC: welcome to the un-realPC. FWB fessed up to the fact that past management lied about what was happening to the product. It seems that all this time, and for all the announcements of a product that was about to be released, it was never being worked on. As of August 28th, FWB admits to the fact there will be no release of this product from them. This is really too bad; now that Microsoft owns Virtual PC we could really use the competition to drive the advancements in that area.

By all reports, FileMaker 7 should be shipping by the time you are reading this column. Rumors have it being a major upgrade with many new and improved features. Hopefully, they will fix the corruption of the large databases that occurred when changing from 5.0 to 6.0 at the same time.

Toast 6.0 is currently shipping. With Toast 6, users can now author Video CDs, Super VCDs and DVDs (DVD burner required), complete with menus, buttons and chapters that can be played on either a home DVD player or computer. Priced at $99, the only question I have is, “will it be as easy to create a CD with as the Apple software is?” If it is, then many of us without internal SuperDrives will be able to create DVDs on external DVD-R recorders without having to upgrade our internal CD-RW drives.For those of you who saw the East Coast black-out as an excuse to buy an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)—good for you. To those that have no backup power in place, be prepared to lose a lot of work when the power goes out in your area. The UPS will keep a tower and monitor running for about 10 to 20 minutes depending on what size you buy. However, during one of our power outages a couple years ago, I used mine to keep my PowerBook running for five hours. Not bad for a 3400 only rated for two hours of battery life.

WRITER COMMENTARY
I had a reader call me the other day to complain that, in last month’s article, I had not given out the brand name of the specific media I use to burn DVDs and had only said to do research on the web. Many times, foolish people stick out their necks and recommend a product. Two months later the product has a bad run and your name is forever linked to it. Not the sort of thing you really want to happen. However the media we use right now is called Ritek, and we buy it in spools of 100 disks in order to get better pricing. So there you are, as of now it works fine.Which brings me to another point about that call. When I told the caller I write this column as a volunteer and do not get paid to do research for people, the caller replied that he does pay for membership and therefore the group is getting paid. Let me make one thing really clear: with the exception of some for-pay classes, everyone in PMUG volunteers their time. User Groups are members helping members, and everyone is supposed to help and share. This column is written in the spare time I have for sharing with UG members. The money that comes into PMUG goes for Mouse Tracks, PMUG College, rent, and other events. If you don’t feel you’re getting your money’s worth, then volunteer. Help by opening the PMUG office during the day, or volunteer to help the college instructors. The more volunteers we have, the more PMUG can do. Each and every one of you is just as important to PMUG’s health as money is.

Be aware that more and more software updaters are requiring you to have the previous version before they will allow you to install. So as in the case of Microsoft Office, you need to have installed the 10.1.2 Office updater and the 10.2.4 Office updater before you can install the 10.2.5 updater. I can understand that; now my question is if they want you to live by these rules, then where the devil is the 10.2.3 updater that should have been in there somewhere? I mean, how do you know you have all the updates if they skip numbers whenever they feel like it. Attention Microsoft—if you are going to require the end user to upgrade in a certain manner, then you need to provide consistent ground rules and numbering.

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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