Low End Mac's newest computer, a refurbished eMac 700 with a Combo drive ordered from the
Apple Store last week, arrived yesterday. I didn't have much time to
work with it before I had to go to work at the camera store, but I did
get it set up.
The first step was making sure that my monitor stand was strong
enough. The box says it's rated for 85 pounds, so the 50 pound eMac
won't break it. Then take the TiBook off the stand, take out a 1"
spacer, and put the eMac on it. This puts the computer at a very
comfortable working height with the top of the display roughly at eye
level.
First Impressions
Since I already have a wireless mouse and keyboard, the white eMac
keyboard replaced the original compact keyboard on the iMac 333 my wife uses for her business, and
my second oldest son claimed the white Pro mouse to replace the round
iMac mouse he's been using for month.
The hardest part was turning the computer on. There's no power
button on the front, which is where the iMacs and Power Macs have had
it. Instead, it's on the side behind the modem, ethernet, FireWire,
USB, and sound ports. I had to check the setup sheet to find it.
After I got home from work and playing "taxi dad," I boosted the RAM
by adding a 512 MB module, purchased from Coast to Coast Memory for
about US$66 shipped (less than I paid for a 1 MB SIMM for my first
Mac a dozen years ago). That made a world of difference. The eMac
worked nicely under OS X, but it didn't seem any faster than my
400 MHz TiBook until I boosted memory from
128 MB to 640.
I also verified that this eMac can boot into OS 9, something I
rarely do, but the only way I can rebuild the Claris Emailer database
or get decent performance from SimCity 2000.
Hard Drives
The hard drive is sluggish. It's an inexpensive Seagate ST340810A 40 GB hard drive, which was designed to be
"one of the quietest drives in the industry." Spinning at a pedestrian
5400 rpm and including a 2 MB buffer, this is a very popular
low-cost drive. The Seagate currently sells for $51 to $79 from a wide
variety of vendors, significantly less than 7200 rpm drives sell
for.
My plan is to run the computer from an external Western Digital 80
GB hard drive in a FireWire enclosure. The drive I have spins at 7200
rpm and includes an 8 MB buffer, so I expect it will be a lot more
sprightly than the internal drive.
I've got to plan the best partitioning scheme and how to move
everything over from the TiBook while not losing the eMac software.
Since the eMac will be my production machine, a file server, and a
network backup host, I want to create a separate partition for shared
files that anyone in the house can access and another one that only my
wife and her employees will have access to. That one I'd like to set up
so it can be accessed remotely just as .mac users access their
iDisk.
Until I get everything figured out, I'm running the eMac from the
internal hard drive in my TiBook (which makes my PowerBook G4 one very
expensive external hard drive!). It took some playing around to figure
it all out, but I finally got FireWire Disk Mode working. The key was
to boot the TiBook after the eMac was up and running; otherwise it
wouldn't see it.
The beauty of this setup is that it lets me work with the same hard
drive, structure, and setup that I've been using - just on a faster
computer.
The Screen
Compared with the 1152 x 768 display on my TiBook, the 17" 1280 x
960 screen on the eMac is wonderful. I used to run a 19" monitor at
1280 x 1024 with my old SuperMac
S900, and I'd forgotten how spacious a bigger monitor can seem
after 28 months on a PowerBook.
The screen is also much brighter than the one on my TiBook, which
isn't as bright as the screens on current PowerBooks. Early in the
morning the sun sometimes streams through the sliding glass door and
makes it impossible to read the screen on my PowerBook until I turn it.
With the eMac's flat 17" CRT, the sun is streaming in, contrast is
reduced a bit, but it's not the least bit unusable.
Screen colors are also different from those on the PowerBook's LCD
display. Yellows are especially vibrant, something I really notice with
the Low End Mac graphic at the top of each page.
Although I still find the slightly off white eMac boring (c'mon,
Apple, bring back some color), the rest of the machine's design is
excellent. The ports are on the side, both RAM slots and the battery
are easily accessed through a cover on the eMac's bottom, and the way
the CRT is set within the white and transparent case is a visual
treat.
At this point, I'm pretty happy with my purchase. I think I was just
lucky to find the refurbished Combo drive 700 MHz eMac at the Apple
Store for $749 (plus sales tax, but including shipping), since most
days they don't have any of these listed.
Oops
Well, things are not quite perfect. So far the eMac has locked up
three or four times. I'm going to boot into OS 9 and run RAMometer
to look for memory problems after I upload this article. I have been
having some problems lately with classic locking up, but this goes
beyond that and locks up the whole computer.
By the way, when the eMac locks up so tight that it won't even
respond to a three-fingered salute (cmd-opt-esc) restart, just hold the
power key for five seconds to shut down the machine. One more tidbit I
found in the manual.
More later in the week as I get the other drives set up, move files
from the TiBook, and spend more time with eM (doesn't everyone name
their Mac?).
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