Blame It on Mac OS

2001: A friend and I were having a “Mac OS stinks” discussion one day when, for once, he brought up a valid point on why the Mac OS does, in fact, stink: When you hold down the mouse button, the whole operating system comes to halt. Should anything interactive be running when you do that, […]

ATI Radeon Mac Edition PCI

The ATI Radeon PCI is a 7″ PCI video card that works in a standard 33 MHz PCI slot or Apple’s accelerated 66 MHz PCI slot. It supports ATI’s Video Immersion Technology, so it can be used to view DVDs. Except for its PCI bus, this is essentially the same video card as the ATI […]

Downgrading the OS: Newer Is Not Always Better

In my school and district, we are beset with the many problems associated with an aging fleet of Power Mac 5200s. The 5200, an all-in-one design, contains design flaws described elsewhere on Low End Mac. Suffice to say they are slow, crash a lot, and don’t do anything particularly well (although they are okay at […]

Create a Random Number Picker in AppleWorks

Occasionally a teacher discovers that they ask the same students to answer questions over and over because some students are more enthusiastic, while others are content to melt into the background. In order to bring more students into the discussion, I ask students at random – selected by a dice roll or by computer – […]

Inside the Box

2001: After shaking up the computer world with sleek hardware designs, Apple is finally getting serious about pushing “the other half” of its business: software. What’s inside the box is essential to the Apple business, but it is widely ignored in print and ad campaigns. After all, a curvy iMac looks much better on a […]

Digital Audio Power Mac G4

Apple doesn’t make it easy – this is the fourth model using the name Power Mac G4 and the same case. What most differentiates the Digital Audio version from earlier models is the 133 MHz bus on the motherboard with four PCI slots plus an AGP slot, one more PCI slot than previous models.

Using ProTools Free 3.4 with Older Macs

ProTools v3.4 Digital Audio Workstation software was released on CD-ROM free of charge by Digidesign as a promotional effort in 1997. It is an older but fully-functional 16-track version of the program. Pro Tools v3.4 was only approved for use with some PCI-based Power Macs, but it is possible to run the program on many […]

Starting a Presentation in AppleWorks

This short appendix is not a tutorial on how to make presentations on the computer, but rather how to get one started in AppleWorks 5. AppleWorks 5 has the ability to take almost any document and turn it into a full-screen, menu-less display, but the functions are hidden. There are also some built-in presentation templates […]