May 2001 – Back in 1998, the new Director of Management Information Systems at the Grand Rapids (MI) Public Schools (GRPS) decided to move the school system to Windows. Mac using parents and teachers fought back (see Grand Rapids (MI) Schools Standardizing on Windows).
Author Archives: Daniel Knight
Sometime the IRS doesn’t seem to be living in the real world – depreciating new computers over a five-year period is one example.
The science fiction world lost a great humorist and the Mac community lost a great advocate on Friday, May 11, 2001, when Douglas Adams unexpectedly passed on at the age of 49.
2001 – Apple has hit several home runs in the past few years, but it never did anything as fine as the latest iBook. The 4.9 pound portable is an almost incredible combination of strength, small size, good looks, and technology at a good price.
2001 – Four years ago, there was no Low End Mac. There were good resources for PowerBooks and Power Macs, but support for older models was spotty. You might find a really good Mac Plus page or a site with excellent Mac IIfx info, but I couldn’t find a comprehensive resource covering the oldest Macs.
Hey, what happened to Low End Mac? Have you guys gone nuts? No. We realize that the future of the Macintosh platform is intimately tied to the future of Apple Computer. If you don’t buy a new Mac every now and then, Apple suffers financially…
A local auto dealer has been pushing “drive new every two” for a few years. It’s also become the norm in the Windows world, where three years used to be the norm. Mac users, it’s time to make “buy new every two” our battle cry as well!
2001: Before I even knew there was a firmware update for my PowerBook G4, the Mac Web let me know that a lot of users were having problems with it. These updates were posted late Friday, March 23. By Saturday morning, sites like Accelerate Your Mac, Mac Observer, MacCentral, and MacFixIt were reporting big trouble […]
2001: The newest addition to our benchmark suite is TimeDrive 1.3 (available here), which measures drive throughput. This can test a floppy, Zip, hard drive, or RAM Disk. TimeDrive is fairly primitive; the benefit of that is being able to run it on very old Macs.
2001 – This article was posted about three weeks before Mac OS X 10.0 first shipped, so it reflects the reality under Mac OS 9.1. OS X has far better multiprocessor support, which Bare Feats demonstrated in an October 2001 comparison of single- and dual-processor G4 Power Macs using OS X 10.1.
2001 – What was Steve Jobs thinking? That seems to be the #1 question on the Mac Web and in the online computer press around the world. Blue Dalmatian? Flower Power?
2001: Almost everyone loves the PowerBook G4 – Mac folk are calling it the greatest PowerBook ever, and some Windows users see it as the best laptop ever. Shoot, some might even convert from the dark side!
Greg Landweber is far better known for Kaleidoscope than for SmoothType. I know a lot of Mac users who love to play around with their interface; I know few as interested in how good text looks on the screen. Yet I suspect cleaner type does more to improving the interface than different colors, sounds, and […]
2001: Thanks to several readers who emailed to suggest I pick up one of those plastic fish tank thermometers to measure the temperature of various parts of my PowerBook G4. Unfortunately, we had freezing rain overnight, so I don’t know when I’ll be venturing out to find one, but it sounds like it should work […]
2001: Monday morning, I received a Podium CoolPad from Road Tools. It’s a compact device measuring 11″ wide and 8.7″ deep. The base has a swivel, so you can easily turn a laptop from side to side. It also comes with adjustable risers, which let you raise the back of your notebook computer from 0.5″ […]
I don’t know when I first discovered Clean-Install Assistant (C-IA), but it’s been an invaluable tool ever since.
2001: I’ve put in a lot more hours and run a few more tests on Quicksilver, my 400 MHz PowerBook G4.
2001: Yes, it is a bit odd to own the newest PowerBook at Low End Mac. It doesn’t seem very low-end, does it? I could try to justify it: Apple has announced a 733 MHz Power Mac G4 and also has a 500 MHz PowerBook G4, after all.
I got my PowerBook G4 on Wednesday afternoon, spent a couple hours getting it ready, and shared my initial impressions Wednesday evening. Then I got to work moving all my files from my aging SuperMac S900 (a 1996 Macintosh clone with many upgrades) to the new TiBook – it took hours.
2001: For the past couple days, we’ve been hearing rumors that TiBooks (the Titanium PowerBook G4) are shipping. My dealer told me yesterday that mine had shipped from Taiwan via FedEx. They promised to let me know as soon as they had an ETA.
This is our third and final look at Henry Bortman’s “Macintosh 2000” predictions in the March 1992 issue of MacUser.
This is rather unusual for us – two different Low End Mac staffers reviewing the same software. But what Battery Amnesia does can be so incredible that you might not believe just one of us. (Note that Lithium-ion batteries, which Apple has used since the PowerBook 3400c in 1997, are not susceptible to the memory […]
“Which is the better server for my home network, the Quadra 650 I’ve been using or the smaller Quadra 605?”
The Mac Classic uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. The installed hard drive is a 170 MB Quantum ELS170S formatted with LaCie Silverlining software. This was not the original hard drive, which was a slower 40 MB mechanism.
The Mac SE/30 uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 16 MHz 68882 FPU, just like the Mac IIx and IIcx. The hard drive in this SE/30 is an Apple-branded Quantum LP80S formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.
2000 – I’ve been using MenuChoice 2.1 for ages, probably going back to the System 7.1 era (1992-94). It’s one of those remarkable pieces of shareware that I’ve come to depend on – and it’s so well written that, despite the fact that is hasn’t been updated since April 18, 1994, it works flawlessly with […]
2000 – We covered quite a range of topics last week. This article follows up on some of them.
The Mac Plus came with an 8 MHz 68000 CPU; the Brainstorm upgrade replaces that with a low power 16 MHz 68000. Brainstorm had the guts to claim it could more than double performance. Some claims just beg to be tested.
The Mac Classic II uses the same 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 16 MHz 68882 FPU as the SE/30, the model it replaced. The computer was tested with the same external drive used for Speedometer 3 on the SE/30; the internal hard drive was also benchmarked.
