Upgrading a 200 MHz Mac
From Michael J. Mcnall
Dear Charles,
Thank you for your wonderful site. Your
article on upgrading a 200 MHz machine gave me the push to redo
mine. I have a 7300/200 obtained
cheaply off eBay.
It was agonizingly slow compared to the dual
800 Quicksilver, especially Web surfing. I went to OWC and bought
the below:
- Sonnet Crescendo G3/450
- 256 MB of RAM
- A 9.1 gig IBM UltraStar 7200 rpm.
I am hooked up to a cable modem through Roadrunner, and before the
upgrade the speed test would read 23-27 K bytes/sec. After the
upgrade I hit between 260 and 360 Kbytes/sec. The odd aspect is IE
4.5 seems faster than 5.1. Photoshop files spend less time time in
the beach ball spin than before.
The main obstacle to the upgrade was terminating the hard drive
correctly. I asked the tech help at OWC (very helpful folks) for the
pin numbers. I counted from the wrong side, wasting much time. The
drive refused to fit the case also. I ended up hack sawing a one inch
gap in the metal frame behind the power cable in order to mount it.
Am I now a true hacker?
There is a residual glitch on restart, the power light is, but
nothing is showing on the screen, to save for another day. It may be
the old 8 MB Twin Turbo is out of sync.
I am very pleased with the Mac now. I replaces my beloved
Lombard 400, whose logic board
and 256 RAM chip died recently, and I can't justify rebuilding at
$700.
Sincerely,
Michael
- Hi Michael,
Thanks for the very encouraging report. There's lots of useful
life in those old PCI Power Macs and clones, it seems.
Charles
Using two mice simultaneously
From Ken Watanabe
Charles,
As always, I enjoy your commentary on LEM and elsewhere. I've been
playing with Jaguar after installing it on a Pismo
PowerBook recently. Apple has really hit a home run with this
release.
Earlier today, I was playing with a Wacom Graphire tablet, and the
very cool Ink handwriting recognition features, when I was somehow
reminded me about your comments that Jaguar did not support the use
of two mice simultaneously. Now, the Wacom tablet includes a cordless
mouse, but it is a different type of device with its own driver. It
looks like a mouse, but it works more like the tablet's pen. I
thought perhaps it and a regular USB mouse might do your two-mouse
trick where two regular mice would not.
The regular mouse I use is a Microsoft optical mouse. I seem to be
able to use the Wacom tablet mouse and the regular mouse
simultaneously. However, not knowing your specific requirements and
what you mean by "simultaneously," I could not be sure if the bug you
mentioned was there.
Do you own or have access to Wacom Graphire tablet (or one of the
more expensive pro models)? If not, I'd be happy to confirm that a
specific set of actions can (or cannot) be performed in Jaguar with a
Wacom Graphire mouse and a typical USB mouse.
- Ken Watanabe
- Hi Ken,
Thanks for your interest in this issue.
What I need is essentially to be able to hold down the button on
one mouse (in this case, my foot operated mouse) and then be able
to drag things around or highlight text, etc., using a second
mouse.
If the Graphire Tablet will do the equivalent, that's encouraging
news. I may be getting a Graphire tablet to test soon, but I would
be very interested to hear if you can make this work in Jaguar
(which I don't have yet).
Charles
Re: Using two mice simultaneously
From Ken Watanabe
Charles,
I tried some things as you suggested. Good news. Most of the time,
the two-mouse actions seem to work in Jaguar if one of the mice is
the Wacom Graphire "pseudo-mouse."
If I make my USB mouse the "button" and the Wacom tablet mouse the
"movement," it works most of the time.
What seems to work:
- Single click actions (selecting a file/folder icon, clicking a
link in browser)
- Double click actions (selecting a word in a document, opening
a file/folder icon)
- Clicking and dragging to select text in document (a little
inconsistent, worked correctly about 90% of the time)
- Clicking and dragging to select icons in a Finder window
- Menu actions (pulling down a menu and selecting a
command)
What seems to not work:
- Dragging an icon (or icons) after selecting it (them)
- Dragging selected text in a document (worked a few times
actually, but not very consistent)
If I switch the mouse functions - make the Wacom tablet mouse the
"button" and the USB mouse the "movement" - it works even better.
Almost everything I tried worked as expected. There seemed to be a
short delay in recognition when movement after clicking was involved.
A few times, the action did not work (mostly when dragging after
selecting), but it worked if I tried again. So it's still not
perfect, and that short delay could be annoying.
I can also confirm that with two regular mice (in my case using
the USB mouse and the PowerBook's trackpad), the two-mouse actions
just do not work. As I suggested in my previous message, perhaps it
doesn't work because both mice use the same driver. However, I
believe Kensington has a custom Mac OS X driver for its USB
mice, so maybe it will also generally work when one of the two mice
has a custom driver (and the other one uses the built-in driver).
You should definitely give it a try.
- Ken
- Hi Ken,
Thanks for the research and suggestions.
No combination of regular pointing devices I've tried has worked,
so the success you had with the Graphire is encouraging.
I'm wondering why this two-mouse thing seems to work without
difficulty in OS 9, in which also, I assume, there is just
the one mouse driver, but not in OS X. Wish I understood the
underlying principles better.
Charles
Re; Re: Using two mice simultaneously
From Ken Watanabe
Well, on a final note, I retract my two-driver theory. After
playing with the Wacom, I noticed that Microsoft had released
their custom mouse driver for Mac OS X. I had been using
the built-in driver because it handled the right-click and
scroll-wheel actions fine. I dl'ed and installed it - works fine and
gives a few extra options for the MS mouse. But for the two-mouse
actions, it did not work any better than before when I just had the
built-in driver doing all the work. So the Wacom may be unique in
allowing two mice to work together after all.
I don't understand the technical aspects either - only that in
Mac OS 9, the GUI is tied in to the OS much more closely than in
X, where the GUI is more of a shell around the OS.
- Ken
- Hi Ken,
Just a follow-up. I'm testing a Logitech Cordless Freedom
Keyboard/Optical Mouseman combo for a review, and these products
do have their own driver. Still no joy as far as
simultaneous dual mousing goes.
However, these two Logitech products are wonderful! Lovely feel,
all the bells and whistles you could ask for, and with the three
programmable mouse buttons plus scroll wheels on both the mouse
and keyboard, they go a long way toward easing the stress of
mousing. The driver software works flawlessly in OS X by the
way.
Charles
Re: Low-end PowerBooks for College
From Chris Smolyk
Charles....
I enjoyed your article, particularly because I have come to do a
fair amount of this kind of work with a lot of students from the
campus nearby. The word is out to "talk to Chris, the Mac guy," and
they call me up.
I evangelize the reliability and cost of old Macs for the
basics.
Recently was given a 6500 (the
Wintel onslaught, relentlessly driving Macs out of schools and
campuses wherever they can - so the old Macs are often given away to
those who will "find them a home"). It is a big improvement over my
6100, but I am noticing a few
bugs. In moving to OS 8.6, I find that the Apple Menu cannot be
accessed if I am in the Finder/Desktop - only if I select another
application.
Then, and this is the one that bothers me, I am getting Type 11
errors in Eudora 3.1.3, which is an absolute first choice for me.
Have you heard of anyone having this error, or what the remedy may
be?
chris s
- Hi Chris,
As you're probably aware, there were not uncommon motherboard
issues with the 6500s. Your problem is likely software, but you
might start suspecting the mobo if you can't find a software cause
for the erratic behavior. Eudora 3.1.3 is about as stable a piece
of software as I've ever used. It still works great for me in OS
9.2.2 on this Pismo.
Charles
Apple CD Driver for Clones
From Steven Hunter
I'm sure you knew about this, but just in case:
<http://www.resexcellence.com/hack_html_99/12-21-98.shtml>
Still works, even with 9.2, (albeit the locations of the target
strings are different with the latest driver) so you can use a newer
driver than the 5.3.1 you mentioned today.
Go to Charles Moore's Mailbag index.
