WallStreet
From Adam R. S. Guha
Glad to hear your WallStreet is working again.
I'd say the processor failure was probably just one of those 'stuff
happens' type things. Back when I had my Lombard G3, the fan had
shorted out for absolutely no reason. Once it was replaced I had no
more trouble with it. And my Dell laptop (and this probably says
something about the quality of the machine) had a hard drive failure
and a keyboard failure at the same time. Shortly thereafter the battery
'suddenly' died. I was about to suspect something with the motherboard,
but replacing the battery, hard drive, and keyboard got everything
working again - that was last winter, and I'm sending this e-mail from
that computer now.
It's good that you'll be able to get more use out of the WallStreet.
My dad's got one also - top of the line model when new, 266 MHz, 14"
screen, 8 GB hard drive - that he relegated to the closet after
its battery died. I told him it's probably got another year or two left
in it. Like you said, even a 'slow' G3 chip can still feel pretty fast
when running OS 9. I mean, my now 'obsolete' beige G3 works just
fine doing recording with ProTools under OS 9. A new G5 wouldn't
make the recording process take less time, so I have no reason to
replace the G3 with a faster machine.
Adam
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the musings. Yes, it could have been just
one of those things. The old machine is certainly working great
now.
Too bad your dad's WS is just sitting around if all
that ails it is a dead battery. These are wonderful computers.
Charles
WallStreet tales
From PEA
Dear Mr. Moore:
I'm a dual system user, with G3 Mac PowerBooks and Wintel desktops
used as needed. (I was a Wintel-only sort until a "thrift shop Mac"
popped up one day for $40, then $25, and I brought this SE 4/40 home. It left for a Packard
Bell-afflicted computer user as an SE/30 32/540 a year later.) I bought
a 266 MHz (rev. 2) from an Ontario
eBay vendor in 2001 to use a Sony CRX-1650L FireWire CD-RW via a
VST FireWire PC card. This was a 4 GB/128 MB RAM unit running OS 8.6
that wasn't having any of this FireWire nonsense. (To make a very long
story short, things began happening under OS 9.2.2 when I upgraded the
beast to 256 MB RAM and a 40 GB HDD and added a FireWire2Go PC card in
anticipation of upgrading to OS X 10.2, a.k.a. Jaguar.) I could
now burn CD-Rs, something that my Wintel desktops had been able to do
for years!
I still have the 266 MHz card, because previous to the RAM/HDD
upgrade, I'd had a Sonnet 500 MHz G3 processor card installed in a vain
attempt to get a Que! Fire 24X CD-RW unit to work. (The VST FireWire PC
card has never worked, as it turned out.) The "Jaguar" WallStreet runs
OK, though things do happen faster if I reboot to OS 9.2.2 and run
Classic applications like FileMaker Pro 5 or Office 98. As for
the fan, Hawai'i averages 75-80 degree Fahrenheit days, so WallStreet
tells me to "cool it" after about 1-2 hours plugged into the AC
adapter. (Yes, the G3 units are "card table" computers, plugged into
the round AC adapters unless needed far from the wall plug.)
It is unfortunate that OS X 10.3 marks the official end of the trail
for these beefy units, but it had to happen sooner than later. I'm
writing to you on a Lombard, which had been called a "400 MHz Pismo" on
eBay. (So I looked for a 500 MHz Pismo just to make sure I got a native
FireWire G3 PowerBook the next time!) This "red headed cousin" has
never let me down and ran just fine out of the box, while the
WallStreet's internal modem extension arrived turned off, which
mystified this "Mac naive" user to the tune of $95 at the
25-miles-distant Mac shop. (The Pismo's internal modem, by contrast,
was toast.)
I didn't learn about Macs in a vacuum, I have a
four-miles-over-the-hill-Apple-since-II series-guru who told me about
Low End Mac, Mac bits and pieces on eBay,
and other "check your extensions" tips. The Wintel desktop doesn't get
used as much these days, since virus-free surfing of the Internet is
the preferred way to go. (Now, if spammers and identity thieves could
be declared international terrorists and hunted down with gusto, 'Net
life would be less complex.) Excuse me, I have to check on an eBay
auction for FileMaker Pro 6, the last major software upgrade to
OS X before I enter the "will it mess up the Pismo/Lombard?"
OS X 10.3 Panther upgrade follies.
The Mac SE was an early model, complete with 800K floppy drive to go
with the 40 MB HDD. (The previous owner had left everything on the HDD,
from notes to students he taught as a Marine Science TA, to jokes, to
resumes for his next job!) It wasn't long before I found out that
Wintel computers can download Mac files, but Macs can't access them.
Plus, the 800K floppy drive couldn't read HD floppies, though I did use
old DD IBM floppy disks to back up MS Word 4 and Excel 3 files written
under OS 6.
So it was off to eBay for a HD floppy drive, then an SE/30 motherboard to support the
floppies. That's when I found out that Wintel downloads were still
foreign to the SE. It was time to "get another Mac that could talk to
the original Mac." My neighboring Mac friend has/had a collection of
pre-PowerPC Macs, from a PowerBook 160 to
several "pizza boxes," but reading LEM articles convinced me that a
PowerBook Kanga or 1400 would be a better bet. The eBay
bidding wars convinced me that a Kanga was too rare/expensive a
proposition, so 1400s became the object of contest.
To make a long story short, an ex-elementary school PowerBook
1400C/166 arrived from Pennsylvania one day and reminded me of what it had been like to use a laptop
again. Back when Windows was version 3.0, I'd bought a Toshiba 1200XE
12 MHz 80286/20 MB/1 MB RAM for the dramatic price of $2,000. My timing
was awful; three months later the first 80386 laptops with 30- and 40
MB HDDs arrived, so I made acquaintance with PC GEOS/Geoworks 1.0 as a
Windows substitute. (I also tried one of those "HDD space doublers" for
a virtual 35 MB, which turned out to be as satisfying as crackers made
of cardboard boxes.) I learned how to take apart the unit to install an
internal 2400 baud modem and tried not to mind CGA monochrome graphics.
This unit later left for college with a family friend's son.
The 1400 allowed me to use a computer where I was, instead of having
to go to the Wintel desktop. The external modem was a quaint reminder
the IBM XT system that I'd used when I worked for a portrait
photography studio, until I upgraded PC card modem. In time, I added a
32 MB RAM module to the bring it up to the 64 MB maximum, and upgraded
the OS from 8.1 to 8.5. Then I discovered PowerPrint 3, which made it
possible to use my IBM printers. Things went well for a time until one
day the CD-ROM drive refused to read anything, be it music CD, data, or
program CD. I found a 20x CD-ROM drive replacement kit on eBay, and it
worked okay, though the latch was a bit iffy.
Not quite a year later, I got interested in FireWire, burning CD-Rs,
and moving up to a 32-bit PC card system. So began the next great
PowerBook hunt, usually unsuccessful, since bids were for serious
money. (The 1400 had cost somewhere in the $140 range, while most
MainStreet and
WallStreet units were "north of $500" - and occasionally over $900!)
After chasing 233 MHz and the rare 300 MHz rev. 2 WallStreet, I settled
on the 266 range, trying not to faint at the $850-$900 price ranges.
After a number of losing bids, a Mr. Tai Lam of Ontario accepted a $770
($27 S+H) bid for such a middle-of-the-road unit. The rest you've read
about, and the G3 era began.
The 1400, along with an Apple Color StyleWriter, left with yet
another student who needed a computer for school. I wonder if the SCSI
stuff should have gone with it; a 36 GB (4 x 9 GB) external HDD and a
8x CD-RW drive, since I'm upgrading to OS X applications and such
hardware is foreign to Jaguar. Looking back, although the Lombard and
Pismo are compact units, there are times I wished to locate a crazed
Mac Tech to stuff the WallStreet's innards into the 1400's shell, to
create an "almost iBook" of tank-like reliability. (Just as I've
wondered if there's a "Gyro Gearloose" Mac Tech who'd move a trashed
cosmetically, but still working, G4 800 MHz into a "bronze keyboard"
case before the advent of G4 iBooks.)
Oh well, xlr8yourmac.com has people almost
as crazy as my Mac friend, who moved a "dead monitor" 233 MHz iMac into
a desktop PC case for a "poor/crazy man's Cube"! I supplied a
damaged-in-transit Sony CRX-1611 CD-RW drive, which he fixed and now
has a real conversation piece. He says it's like his 266 MHz WallStreet
as far as Jaguar is concerned, needing only a 14 inch or larger monitor
to surf the Internet, play around with iTunes 4.x, or burn CD-Rs. Thank
you for slogging through yet another long tale, and I wonder if there's
a Mac version of Shutterbug Ads? (There lies a story of collecting
ancient Leica screw thread lenses and accessories, but that's another
tale.)
PEA
P.S.: The first RAM upgrade to the WallStreet came when my Mac
friend couldn't get the then-live-monitor 233 MHz iMac to accept a 128
MB RAM SIMM. So I ended up with 192 MB RAM, and found that I could burn
CD-Rs on the "does not work with Apple PC cards" Sony CRX-1650L via a
FireWire2Go card. The WallStreet and Lombard now purr along with 384 MB
RAM each, and the Pismo might do video someday with 640 MB RAM. Thanks
to Data Memory Systems,
which my "mad Mac friend" and I endorse for worry-free RAM and HDD
upgrades.
P.P.S.: I would pay money for a print version of Low End Mac, since
it will be some time before I upgrade to a G4, let alone G5 Apple
computer. (Most Mac magazine writers extol the new stuff as if money
did grow on trees!)
Hi PEA,
Thanks for the chronicle. Glad to hear you're still
getting good service from both the WallStreet and the Lombard. My son's
Lombard 333 was (is - it's still going strong under new ownership) one
tough machine. He gave it rough service, and it never missed a beat. It
even runs OS X decently well.
Incidentally, "Old Fart's Guide To The Macintosh"
author Aaron Rosenzweig runs his Cocoa Nuts website off a
circa 1998 WallStreet 266 MHz on Mac OS X. Aaron says: "Not only
does this computer handle our Web site, but it is also the secretary's
computer and our fax machine."
Glad you enjoy LEM. There's lots of life in these old
computers yet. For the past six months I've been spending about 1/4 of
my computing time on a PowerBook 1400cs/117, and now that my
WallStreet's working again, and replaced the 1400 as my "laptop-laptop"
that proportion will likely increase. Running OS 9 it's much
faster than my OS X production 'Books and such a pleasure to use
for basic word processing and editing.
Charles
Operating System Upgrade Question
From Andrew Somerton
I own a Power Mac
9600/300. Should I just upgrade it to 9.1 or all the way up to
9.2.2? What benefits/downsides are there to doing that?
Thanks,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
The differences in OS 9 versions are subtle. A few
extra features and refinements in each upgrade.
Any of the OS 9s should work fine with your 9600, but
my personal fave is OS 9.1, but 9.0.4 worked well on my G4 Cube. OS 9.2 does not
support pre-G3 machines, but there is an installer hack available.
Potential reasons for installing 9.2.x are:
1. Compatibility with ATI's latest drivers . ATI
dropped support for OpenGL versions lower than 1.2.2. (9.1 has
1.2.1)
2. You can't run DVD Studio Pro 1.5 or 1.2.1 without
9.2.2.
3. You can't run Final Cut Pro 3 without 9.2.2.
4. Full compatibility with iPod .
5. MacSpeech's iListen dictation software is not
supported by OS 9.1.
If none of those apply to you, it's probably not worth
the trouble. I have both OS 9.1 and OS 9.2.2 installed on my Pismo, and
I boot into OS 9.1 by preference.
OS9
Helper is available as a free download with no support. There
is a support forum available for a $10 fee.
Charles
System Utilities Compared
From Martin Sammtleben
Hi Charles,
I read your article "7 Mac OS X System Utilities
Compared" with great interest - very helpful in depth
information!
After having used Onyx as well I finally have settled for another
utility that might be worth mentioning in that context: Macaroni.
It does not reach the scope of the other utilities but has one
advantage over them: It can run all the maintenance scripts (and any
custom scripts you might want to add) automatically as it's a system
prefs pane module.
It's a matter of install & forget resting assured it will
perform the specified tasks on a regular basis.
Cheers
Martin
Thanks for the report, Martin.
Charles
Apple Catholic Website
From Alvin Chan
Thank you for your time. How are things going? I launched a new,
simple site. It's about Apple computers, ideas, and computers in
general with the spiritual effects and benefits of using them and
vice-versa, viewed as a catholic. It is for everyone (all religions,
churches, and nations), and if you feel good about it, you're welcome
to link it (for those who have sites), to spread the good word. The
site is named Apple
Catholic.
iBook petition
From Brendan Carolan
Hi!
My name is Brendan Carolan, I've been reading your columns on
various sites for a while now, and I was wondering if you could help
spread the word about an online petition I've got going to get Apple to
acknowledge the problem with their dual USB iBook logic boards, namely,
the repeated failure of said logic boards.
The petition is at <http://www.petitiononline.com/ibook123/petition.html>
Hopefully if all of us with this problem get together, they'll have
to do something.
Thanks.
Sure Brendan.
The petition reads:
To: Apple Computer, Inc.
This petition is created to force Apple Computer, Inc.
to admit there is a recurring and endemic problem with their Dual USB
iBook computers, namely, the frequent and repeated failure of the logic
boards in these machines.
We petition that Apple provide recourse to this
problem by either extending the warranty on the logic boards to cover
all purchasers of said machines, or by offering reasonable replacement
options other than the current replacement logic board, which has been
proven faulty.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
PowerBook Petition
From pipebomb
Regarding the PowerBook petition, perhaps it could be used in
conjunction with http://www.PowerBookRecall.com. It
sure seems like there are a lot of unhappy PB owners these days,
doesn't it? :)
Have a good day!
It does, alas.
Charles
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