Dead Pismo
From James Nakashima:
Dear Charles,
My old Pismo was
limping along with dead battery for a while, but it still worked when
plugged in. Now it won't work at all - even when plugged in. The cords
all seem to work okay.
Could this still be a battery problem?
Kindest regards,
James
Hi James,
It seems likely that it's a power management issue or
possibly a dead PRAM battery. The Pismo should work fine on its AC
power adapter alone.
You could try a hard reset if you haven't already.
Here's how to proceed:
- If the computer is on, turn it off.
- It's worth a try pulling the power adapter plug, removing the
battery, and letting it sit for ten minutes or so.
- Press and release the reset button located on the rear panel of the
computer between the external video and modem ports.
- Wait 5 seconds.
- Press the Power button to restart the computer.
Of course there's a chance it could be a hardware
failure.
Charles
Finding Too Many Files with Spotlight
From Gerhard:
Hello Charles!
One question and a lengthy introduction, sorry for it:
I am a long time reader of Low End Mac, from around 1998 onwards. I
really appreciate your work and Dan's, providing so useful information
for us who like to keep their Macs for some more years - thus ending
with a low-end model sooner or later. I started to use Macs in 1987 and
had so bad experiences with NeXT-OS on a NeXT Workstation that I avoided OS X
until 2006.
My first year with my MacBook was disastrous, caused by a faulty
original installation, buggy SheepShaver,
early versions of Parallels, an incompatible xDSL-modem, and my
incompetence. After receiving some coaching, browsing through many
OS X books, and a complete reinstall, I finally got a working
laptop. But until now I feel not as productive as I had been with
System 9. I had a set of well sorted applications, collected over
years, the oldest dating from as early as 1985.
Where I really need your advice on is Spotlight.
Since System 7 or 7.5, searching for files on a Mac was flawless and
fast (before, I relied on Norton's file search). In Sherlock, it was
easy to deactivate content searching by removing one system extension.
But whenever I do a search with Spotlight, I get dozens or hundreds of
hits. I name my files in a way that is good enough to help me find
everything, but Spotlight insists in adding hits where it found the
search string somewhere deeply buried in a cache document or similar
abstruse.
How do you deal with this situation? How do you accomplish an
efficient file search, esp. in Tiger? Please, tell me your search
strategy.
Is there is a way to deactivate content search permanently? I have
heard of a rather complicated way to deactivate it for a single search,
but I do not want to go through this process every time I use
Spotlight. Or do you know of alternative search utilities for
OS X? Probably you may pass my question also to Dan Knight.
Thank you very much.
Kind regards,
Gerhard
Hi Gerhard,
Thank you for the kind words, and I'm delighted to
hear that you find Low End Mac interesting and helpful.
Sorry to hear about the bumpy start with OS X. There
are still a few things I miss about OS 9 (and I still run Classic
Mode on my Tiger machines), but after using OS X as my production
OS since late Jaguar/early Panther, I'm now totally addicted.
However, I agree with you that filename searches in OS
X are pathetic, and while I find Spotlight a useful tool, it does have
a big problem with "too much information" results.
As you probably know, you can do file name searched
using the Find (Command-F in the Finder) dialog, although it is
vexingly cumbersome compared with the way it worked in OS 9.
What I have found works best for me is a little
freeware search utility called Spotinside,
which still does indexed content searches but orders the search returns
much more intelligently than Spotlight. It's not perfect (for example,
it routinely crashes if you try to preview large files), but it is the
fastest and most efficient tool I've found for finding stuff with
OS X. There are several other third-party search utilities, some
quite powerful, but also too feature bloated. Spotinside is simple,
fast, and effective. Works for me!
You can find
my most recent review on Applelinks.
Charles
Question about Panasonic UJ-850 (or UJ-825) Drive
in Pismo
From James Rohde:
Hi (again) Charles,
First, thanks for all your articles (I appreciate them all, even
those that aren't directly usable for me).
Read your Low End Mac reply to
Russell on the UJ-850 Panasonic DVD/SuperDrive, and when I looked,
there were several on
eBay. I won one with shipping for only $21.50 (yay!) and anticipate
installing it in place of my DVD/CD-ROM original drive in my Pismo. I
have an article printout showing how to take apart the original drive
bay/mechanism but was wondering if the Panasonic needs anything special
(cabling, drivers, etc.) to work with the Pismo. Mine has Tiger 10.4.11
installed, 1 GB of RAM, and 120 GB Hitachi hard drive. I'm pretty
sure I have PatchBurn downloaded
on my drive, but I'm at work currently (so may need to download that if
I don't have it).
Any special tips or tricks to get the drive working? I know that my
500 MHz G3 won't be able to do iDVD, but would like capability to use
the Panasonic for data backup as its primary use (other than reading
DVDs and importing music CDs).
Thanks in advance,
Jim Rohde
Hi Jim,
My experience using these drives with Pismos over the
past several years in Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) and Tiger (10.4) has
been that they're pretty much plug and play, although you do need
PatchBurn for full features support.
PatchBurn is fairly frequently updated, so you should
check from time to time to see if you're up to date.
You might also check out Simon Royal's recent
tutorial, Replacing
Your Lombard or Pismo Optical Drive with a SuperDrive, if you
haven't already.
Charles
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