Doom 3 is coming to the Mac, but don't get excited unless you have a really good computer system to run it on. Id Software developed this new version of the Classic PC game and it follows the same style of story line. Even though the graphics are much improved, you'll need a top-of-the-line machine to get any kind of frame rate out of this game. The suggested machine to run this is a G5 with lots of RAM and hard drive space, as well as a good video card like the 128 Meg ATI Radeon 9800 XT or higher. So in other words, unless you're already well heeled with equipment, you may as well leave this one on the shelf. Id needs to tweak the software to look for, and use, the dual processors to make this work well even on high end machines.

Printer Problems
There are many ways to troubleshoot your Mac; one of the easy ones is to restart. I'm not sure how many times I have been on the phone with a client troubleshooting a printer problem with no success, only to have them restart the computer and the problem is gone.

Speaking of printing problems, many of these are solved when new cartridges are installed in both color and black slots. Many folks don't understand that some printers require both even if you are not printing that color. As long as we are on the subject, if you have missing lines in your text, you may want to run the head cleaning program several times to see if they will clear up.

Mac Mini
The Mac mini is having problems with some monitors, so you may want to check if your monitor is supported before purchasing one. If your VGA/Analog display is dim or low-contrast, you may want to try a calibration of your monitor using Apple's Displays color calibrate button.

Rumor sites
If you have not been paying attention to the Apple news sites, you may not know that Apple is trying to force certain rumor sites to give out the names of the people who furnished them with product information prior to its official release. In fact, Apple has just won a ruling to get that very information. This is bringing up some interesting points about the internet and what represents the free press and protection of sources. If Apple succeeds, it could mean many of the web sites providing information and rumors will go away. On the other hand, if Apple does not win, they are at risk of certain people breaking their confidentiality agreements and causing trade secrets to become public. It may not seem like much to us, but a month or two of advance warning can have competitors ready or pre-announcing competing products thus causing a fall in Apple's market share. So, as much as I would like to be on the side of protected press, I can really see Apple's point.

Adobe user group program
Rye Livingston, the long time User Group Program manager at Adobe is no longer at the company. Adobe has eliminated the position and will handle future requests through their web site. Rye was a very good friend to user groups and worked very hard to make sure things happened. Rye will be missed by all User Group leaders, including myself. So, thanks for all the hard work, we will miss you.

PMUG
As some of you may know, I am not running for President of PMUG this time around. It's not that PMUG is boring me, but I feel a need to let someone else take the leadership role for a while. According to PMUG's bylaws I automatically become an office at large, so it's not like I'm leaving. I just feel that with my work on MacCamp, the PMUG office on Tuesday nights, PMUG college, and writing for Mouse Tracks I really need to focus on those tasks. As I leave office I only ask that everyone look around and ask your Macintosh-using neighbors to join the club and have some fun. Yes I know that sounds corny but without a fair number of members we will be forced to stop or cut back our services to club members. In the last six months we have helped 175 people on Tuesday nights in the PMUG office. Thanks for at least reading this.

Viruses
I cannot believe what some people will do to advance the Mac to PC levels. One guy has posted a $25,000 reward for the first hacker to write a Macintosh virus. From what I hear this guy is a scam artist and most likely the hacker would never get paid, but we really don't need these kind of people. Of course on the other side of the coin, we have Symantec trying to scare us into buying their antivirus software because the first virus attack is "just seconds from happening." Give me a break—just keep the virus(es) far away from my computer. I don't need to feel that I have to pay off the antivirus software companies just to use my computer.

Storage
Many of you are thinking about moving up to large hard drives in your computers. You should check and see if your computer can support these drives before buying and having them installed. Most of the older G4 towers support up to 120 Gig, but then you lose the extra space beyond that because the older drive controller can't deal with the large drives. Those of you who need the space on older computers can get an external drive enclosure that will allow you to use a 250 Gig hard drive or larger. However, you need to pick a case that supports large hard drives. I see you guys out there thinking, "I can get a really cheap USB case and have all that space for files." Yes indeed you can; but, and this is a very big but, you need to have USB 2.0 in order to have decent speed for transferring all that data. So unless you have a G5 or a current portable which supports USB 2.0 you are going to be saving files at a pretty slow rate. Your best bet and your fastest choice is FireWire 400 or 800. That's right, FireWire is faster than USB 2.0. You may have read USB 2.0 is really fast, but because of the way it sends the data, it is slower than FireWire. So find yourself a nice case, or have someone you trust put one together for you and there will indeed be space to save all those files. By the way, how do you back up a 250 Gig hard drive? Why, with another 250 Gig hard drive or 59 DVD-Rs or 357 CDs—so I suggest you get started now.

DVD player
Another situation we have recently run into was trying to figure out why the application DVD Player would not work on Janet's G4. This is version 3.2, the computer is running Jaguar, and she's used it before. The problem seemed to start after she had reformatted her startup drive (Carbon Copy Cloned the system off and back on). The error message was, "the current machine or system configuration is not supported." After trying to see if the application had gotten corrupted, she realized that there had also been some changes in the monitors connected to her Mac. The culprit seemed to be the video RAM. The amount of video memory required depends on the bit depth and screen resolution of the monitors, and there needs to be enough memory left over to create the DVD buffers required by the video drivers for DVD Playback.

Disaster Recovery
The cost of computer ownership should, in most cases, include some training on upkeep. Most users just start out and hope nothing ever goes wrong. Very few succeed in achieving this goal. Even veteran computer users have problems: corruption of data or directories happen to even the lucky ones. Sometimes it means that one document is damaged and can't be read; other times you can't even get to your user to try and repair the information. This is where having a plan or having someone write out some rules for you to use is a good idea. Many folks are scared to run utilities on their own for fear that even more damage will occur. So here is something everyone can do. Startup your computer with the System CD ROM (or DVD ROM) in your CD/DVD drive and the C key held down. When it has booted up, do not tell the System to reinstall. You want to go under the File menu and down to Utilities to the Disk Utility and let go. This will launch the Disk Utility program and you will be presented with two windows, the one on your left is where you select which drive you wish to deal with. The one on the right will be grayed out until the drive is selected by clicking on it once. Please Note if you have one drive, there will be two icons in the left window. The top icon is the one you would select if you wished to repair permissions, partition the drive, or create a RAID setup. You want the one under that which usually has a name you have given it. Once it is selected, options will show up in the right-hand window. At the top will be First Aid, Erase, Restore—please select First Aid. Near the bottom of that window will be several buttons. On the left is Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissions; on the right will be Verify Disk and Repair Disk. The two I recommend most users do is Repair Disk followed by Repair Disk Permissions. If the Repair Disk fails you may need to run Alsoft's DiskWarrior to try to fix the problem. If possible, and you have another drive that can boot your computer, you may want to start it up with that drive and copy as much of your user folder and data as you can onto the external drive in case your internal hard drive is damaged or needs to be reformatted. Please remember, if it is a software problem, AppleCare will not cover it, so you need to find someone you trust to deal with the problem. AppleCare only covers hardware problems, which means the Apple people would remove your hard drive, put in another and give your computer back to you. Nice, clean hard drive that you can start over from.

I had a client bring in a Zip disk with files on it from a book they had written and ask if I could tell what programs the documents were done in. Turns out that the work had been done in FreeHand 7 and PageMaker, then converted to PDFs for the printer to deal with. This appeared to have been done on a Macintosh, then copied to a PC Zip drive which stripped out all the resource forks; thus damaging all the fonts and some of the artwork. I would suggest that if you are creating books or other such projects, be sure and keep final copies in several formats so you can have someone else edit it later on if needed.

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