Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => macOS => Topic started by: WMD on 31 October 2005, 02:23
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Yesterday I ordered this:
12" PowerBook
1.5GHz G4
512MB RAM
80GB hard drive (5400rpm)
8x SuperDrive
mobile FX5200 video (whatever they call it)
wireless
all that other stuff
Refurbished from apple.com, $1,299. Should come sometime late this week.
How'd I do?
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Sexy. OSX is a great platform, not as hard core as Linux/BSD but it's still very good, very simple.
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w00t. I have the one below that - the 1.33GHZ with the Combo drive. It's awesome.
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Me too!
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I've got a 14" iBook with combo drive. It's so much better than my dell. I tried to get linux on the dell, but it's too screwed over. I think i might have to try noacpi, nodma and that stuff. I hope the dell dies at the moment, it's an evil POS.
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I've got a 14" iBook with combo drive. It's so much better than my dell. I tried to get linux on the dell, but it's too screwed over. I think i might have to try noacpi, nodma and that stuff. I hope the dell dies at the moment, it's an evil POS.
Maybe you'd send it to me? I have this thing about throwing out PCs that only "went bad" because of something stupid, like a faulty DIMM or something on that order.
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Yeah, you should try reseating everything, and all the connectors inside it...
Might be a loose one.
But knowing it's a dell... :S
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I'll go down to the electronics store and get a set of screwdrivers and a can of air duster soon. Maybe I can get it going. Windows gets stop errors everywhere, and linux won't boot. I'm certainly not going to throw it out though.
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Heh... hope you do get it working so you can get Windows off it ASAP...
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Ok, I have a set of torxes and a can of air duster. I'll take the laptop apart soon...
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Nice thread hijacking guys... :p
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512MB isn't much memory these days - hopefully the chip setup allows you to do a cheap and fast upgrade. I mean, I have 640MB on my G3! Otherwise, good buy - refurbished Apples are the way to go.
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512MB isn't much memory these days - hopefully the chip setup allows you to do a cheap and fast upgrade.
Well, I use a G4/450 at school with 512MB, and it never feels that slow (except during obviously CPU-bound stuff). I might be ok with 512MB. But since you wonder, this PB already has the extra RAM slot filled with a 256MB chip, but it's just as accessible as on the iBook. I've looked up RAM prices on Newegg for this thing, and noting those, I'm not about to jump right in for more RAM. I'll have to see.
Oh, and according to Apple's website, they shipped it out today. w00t!
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Still, I think RAM is better for you than processor speed. I use Illustrator, Fireworks, and Flash a lot, and I can't imagine them on the G3-900 with any less RAM. In fact, if the RAM was upgradeable from 640MB, I would, in a heartbeat.
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Yes. OSX is quite RAM intensive. I suggest not using 512 MB RAM permanently, as this hinders performance greatly.
As of right now, mine is using 761 MB RAM. Remember that dashboard widgets use alot of memory as well.
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I'm running 512 on my iMac, and I've noticed a slight decrease in speed. It gets a little slower when I start Dashboard the first time in a session.
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It shipped in today, but it's at my dad's office. He has to bring it home later tonight.
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It's here!!
I'd never guess it was refurb - it looks perfect. It was supposed to come with 10.4, but they just gave me an install DVD for it and put 10.3 on the hard drive. I'm installing 10.4 now.
For some reason 10.3 wouldn't connect to my ad-hoc wireless network. Hope 10.4 does. :o
Other than that everything is awesome, I'm so happy!
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Uhh ... I bought my notebook about 2 years ago and it's better than yours ahahahaha !
But it cost 3x as much ... I don't care.
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Uhh ... I bought my notebook about 2 years ago and it's better than yours ahahahaha !
They are vaguely compareable.
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For some reason 10.3 wouldn't connect to my ad-hoc wireless network. Hope 10.4 does. :o
Turned out I was putting my WEP key in wrong. Everything works fine.
10.4 with 512MB RAM seems to be working okay. Things seem pretty fast. I am trying to keep the number of open Dashboard widgets to a minimum though - they use like 8-9MB each, all the time!
They gave me trials of MS Office 2004 and iWork, both of which work and seem kinda nice. Except, the Office trial puts watermarks on all your pages... :rolleyes:
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http://dognoodle99.cjb.net/images/screenshot.jpg (kinda slow)
yay
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Just grab open office. Voila! No more watermark. As an added bonus it's free.
But you should know this anyway.
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Uhh ... I bought my notebook about 2 years ago and it's better than yours ahahahaha !
But it cost 3x as much ...
Talk about killing your own argument :p
@ Dark_Me: Yes I know about OpenOffice, but it's rather lackluster on OS X. I might just look up product keys for iWork or (gasp) MS Office. Heck, MS Office for Mac seems rather good, considering. Now, when NeoOffice/J gets updated to 2.0, that's another story.
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MS Office for Mac is good. I've been very happy with MS software for Mac, ever since Office 01 on OS 9. Office X was kinda lackluster when it came out, but it got a patch that made it verrah nice. I still use Office 2001 in Classic, though. It's just that nice.
The problem with OpenOffice.org on OS X is that it runs in X11, which really kills any feeling of integration.
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Yeah. Funny that MS's best developers program for the OTHER platform. :D
BTW...I had a similar problem with Windows Media Player installation as you, Jimmy. It didn't sit for ten minutes on "scanning," but it did take much longer than it needed to.
Some other observations:
1. The screen is very bright, with a good viewing angle. I rarely need to run at 100% brightness. Much improved over my friend's iBook G4.
2. It's fast, despite how "obsolete" the G4 is.
3. Dashboard widgets leak memory. A lot. :o EDIT: Just checked after waking from sleep from last night: they seemed to release a few megs. Either that or I restarted them all and forgot. Which I doubt.
4. System-wide spell checking \o/ :D
5. Two finger scrolling kicks ass.
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I use a program called Mariner Write for all my word processing. It is lite, fast, and full-featured. Costs about $60, and is totally OSX. They have a spreadsheet too, but I don't use spreadsheets often enough to bother.
I like Abiword on Linux, and apparently they have a non-X11 port for OSX. Never used it, but for free, it might be worth a try. Let's not forget that a full version of MSOffice costs $400. That demo will eventually expire.
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Let's not forget that a full version of MSOffice costs $400. That demo will eventually expire.
"Hello, piracy? It's free and only slightly dangerous." - worker201
:p
Having said that, I probably won't pirate MS Office. I forgot about AbiWord for a minute there - I've tried the Mac port, and it's pretty good except when you delete text, you get artifacts left from it.
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http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=12
Are you working on that next great novel or authoring a must-read technical document? There is a good chance your word processor of choice, the tool that is supposed to be helping you, is hindering your efficiency by being either too feature anemic or overwhelmingly bloated.
Try the perfect middle...Mariner Write.
The products are very high quality, the price is more than reasonable, and the company treats its customers well. Considering how extraordinarily kickass this word processor is, $50 is not a lot of money.
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Big deal, it's worth it.
MS Office for mac is one thing I deleted immediately. The fucking "trial almost up" popups irritated the hell out of me.
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Don't forget about Lyx ... it's not too bad:
http://www.lyx.org/ (http://www.lyx.org/)
and you can try gnumeric for spreadsheets, you gotta compile from source
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/downloads.shtml (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/downloads.shtml)
or try:
http://gnumeric.darwinports.com/ (http://gnumeric.darwinports.com/)
it's not quite capable of doing regressions and stuff like that, I spent some time earlier today trying to figure it out ... then went back to OpenOffice
By the way OpenOffice 2.0 crashes every 5 min. like Word used to, so I use 1.1.5, which has never crashed.
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By the way OpenOffice 2.0 crashes every 5 min.
If it's crashing like that you better report it, so they can be fixed for the next release.
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Oh man have I been reporting it ... it looks like they are having an overflow of errors cuz they released it too fucking early !!!
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Well, it works fine for me.
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I like gnumeric a lot, as far as spreadsheets go, but it crashes like a motherfucker. Its general instability has caused it to be considered application-non-grata in apt repos and Fedora distros. Hopefully one day they will get it figured out, because it is the best general spreadsheet available.
Now, when are we going to see Quattro again?
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Well, it works fine for me.
Are you running it on Linux ?
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MacOSX 10.4.2
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Well, then it's probably only the Linux version that's fucked :(
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Well, then it's probably only the Linux version that's fucked :(
I seriously doubt that.
Can you reproduce any of the crashes?
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I seriously doubt that.
Can you reproduce any of the crashes?
They are quite hard if not impossible to reproduce, it just crashes for no particular reason ... I suspect it has something to do with charts because it has never crashed if a chart was not present in the file.
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OpenOffice is perfectly stable on my Mac.
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Update: yesterday I used a DVD-R for the first time, and apparently I suffer from the 2x limit problem. http://superdrive.crc.id.au Luckily it was one I was burning for a friend, not some I bought myself.
:(
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Ouch, that kinda sucks. I've heard reports that it's pretty easy to swap out the drive, once you get the case opened. Would be nice if Apple payed for it, though.
BTW, many Linux OpenOffice users are having crash problems with charts. I and others suspect that this was caused by a rush to meet the release date projections. There will probably be a fix release soon.
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Ah, so H_TeXMeX_H was right when he said it must be GNU/Linux-specific. I assumed that it'd be tested quite a lot on GNU/Linux (probably more than OS X and possibly more than Windows).
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Which leads me to believe that it isn't necessarily an OpenOffice problem, but a compat problem with some libraries. Maybe even a gnome issue, who knows? Anyway, don't give up on OO just yet.
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How's it working on Fluxbox? Just got X11 up on my Debian box, KDE and GNOME are too bloated for my ancient P-200.
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Ouch, that kinda sucks. I've heard reports that it's pretty easy to swap out the drive, once you get the case opened. Would be nice if Apple payed for it, though.
I wouldn't go that far. All it needs is a new firmware. Heck, I wonder if there's a firmware flasher that can give me the firmware that some other PC company uses. I bet it's possible, though, I haven't heard of anything.
Besides, it isn't a true 2x limit - some discs will work at 4x/8x in there; primarily, Apple's own brand. So far I haven't had any real need to use DVD-R anyway, except for that one time.
P.S.: A full 4.7GB DVD-R, at 2x, takes around a half hour to burn.
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my ancient P-200.
You sure you wanna run OpenOffice (not the fastest of applications) on that thing?
Anyhow, it would require certain GNOME libs to be installed, and would be the same after that (i.e. it would crash alot with charts).
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GNOME is installing now. Not to use, that's what I've got fluxbox for, just for the libs. Besides, I don't use charts. I'm just using this box as a practice machine, after I get good with it I'm getting a better one.
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Anyone know if OpenOffice keeps error logs around on a Linux system ? I've been looking for them, and I googled it too, I can't seem to find them. Maybe if I had them I could have the openoffice guys look at em and see if there's a problem. Actually, one of the chart problems I reported has already been solved (http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56896) ... it wasn't a crash error though, just transparency stuff, but it might have caused the crashing in some obsure way.
In order for me to report the crash errors I need the logs, anyone have a clue to where they might be .. I'll keep looking, but if you already know where they are it would help ;)
I mean telling the openoffice folks that openoffice suddenly crashes for no apparent reason won't do much good ... maybe I'll send em an e-mail and ask about the log, it usually takes about 1 week for a response though :(, I guess they are busy with other things.
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just run openoffice from command line and look and output
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just run openoffice from command line and look and output
Awesome man, thanks so much, it worked :thumbup:, now maybe things will get fixed faster :D
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Another update: Except for one time, I haven't used my Linux desktop since this thing came in. Which somewhat suprises me; I always thought I would use both interchangably. However, this might actually be due to the fact that I unplugged my desktop monitor to test screen spanning on this thing, and I've been too lazy to plug it back in. :D
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Abiword has a native OS X port iirc. Try it.
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Ahhh ... I have fixed my OpenOffice 2.0 problem ... it wasn't openoffice's fault ... it was Fedora ...
The Fedora version of OpenOffice is fucked, and somehow there was a conflict between the messed up Fedora version, that didn't uninstall properly, with the good version from the Ooo site that I tried to install to fix the problem ... but it's all good, I fixed it :thumbup: yay
So the Openoffice you get from the main site is good ... the distro-specific ones may not be (especially the Fedora one)