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!
2001-03-30: A $13 keyboard screen protector, IBM’s new quiet laptop drives, WallStreet PowerBook limit on where OS X can be installed, and more ‘Book news.
2001 – The Finder is the application that gives your Mac its desktop appearance. It displays the menu bar, your desktop background, menus, and icons that you need to get everything done.
Dan Knight, most caring of all Mac-related website editors, thought it was time to allow us people from that little island across the big pond (that’s Great Britain, not Hawaii) who still use Apple computers in the face of ever dwindling numbers of Apple stores and ridiculous retail prices to make their voice heard on […]
PowerBooks are wonderful but problematic. They can be too expensive, a poor desktop replacement, and not really that portable by the time they are packed up for traveling. Many people get caught up in the marketing around PowerBooks or iBooks when they would be better off with a different Mac.
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 […]
2001-03-23: Apple is clearing out leftover 400 MHz Pismo inventory, MadsonLine and Dr. Bott announce new Titanium PowerBook accessories, MCE’s FireWire dock for Lombard and Pismo PowerBooks, and more.
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 – Welcome to the third and final segment of this Outlook Express (OE) tutorial. We went through the most important features of OE in parts 1 and 2. To put the icing on the cake, let’s examine a bunch of convenient features available at your fingertips. They are mostly useful to personalize OE or […]
2001 – There’s a chasm that separates the promise and the reality of PowerBooks. Maybe it is marketing or collective delusion, but PowerBooks can be a horrendous value for many people. Many PowerBook users just don’t get their money’s worth.
2001-03-16: $349 466 MHz G3 upgrade for WallStreet and Lombard PowerBooks. PowerBook 5300 trade-in for Canadians. Leftover Pismo price reduced at Apple education store. More ‘Book news.
2001 – Last week, we went through the basics of Outlook Express (OE). Now it is time for slightly more complex operations to take advantage of the power that begs to be used. In this case, more complexity means more power. OE has a variety of tools that make importing, filtering, and sorting easy. They […]
2001: One year and four months ago, I shared my impressions of how the Macintosh stacks up against the PC in regards to gaming. That was around the time when Quake III Test was out, and I was still toying with my Quadra 605.
2001 – I’ve had the chance to own a lot of high-end PowerBooks. First it was the PowerBook 180 (instead of the top of the line 180c). Then the PowerBook 540. Lately I owned a Pismo PowerBook G3, and next week I’ll get my hands on a PowerBook 3400/180.
2001-03-09: Apple has reinstated trade-in deals on PowerBook 190 and 5300 models. Third-party ColorSync profiles available for iBook, Pismo, and TiBook. More ‘Book news.
Got a Mac in your bedroom? Great – you can use it as an alarm clock! Here’s how to do it.
A man is flying a small airplane and is lost in the clouds. He descends until he spots an office building and yells to a man in an open window, “Where am I?” The man replies, “You are in an airplane about 100 feet above the ground.” The pilot immediately turns to the proper course, […]
2001 – Outlook Express (OE) 5 is the default email application for Macintosh when you install any recent Mac OS. Despite the fact that many folks choose Eudora, Claris Emailer, PowerMail, and other capable clients, many stick with OE since it is free and it satisfies them.
How many clicks or keystrokes did it take you to get to Low End Mac? I used to do nine clicks and keystrokes to get to Low End Mac. One click on iCab on my launcher program called Malph. One Cmd-L to open a URL, and then six keystrokes to type “www.lo” – at which […]
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.
2001-03-02: Welcome to The ‘Book Review, a new Low End Mac feature in which we will review each week’s iBook and PowerBook news in capsule form – new products, price changes, software updates, and suchlike.
2001 – When you took it out of the box, your Mac looked better than anything Windows. Whether you had System 7.5, Mac OS 8, or Mac OS 9, it simply looked better.
I was recently reading a magazine called T3 (Tomorrow’s Technology Today), which has all sorts of gadgets that I would like to buy. They reviewed digital picture frames, and I could see how it would be neat to have a way to display continuous slideshows away from my computer. But the prices were outrageous – […]
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?
Q: I’ve been using many different free Internet service providers, but it seems that more and more free Mac ISPs are either closing their services or dropping support for Macintosh users. I still want free Internet access for my Mac, but I can’t find it anywhere. Are there any more free Internet access services left […]
2001 – Since the release of version 5, Internet Explorer became the Mac world’s number one browser, with many Netscape users dumping the Navigator or Communicator 4.x in order to get Microsoft’s latest offering. In any case, Explorer is very popular in the Mac crowd, and a few of you may want to maximize its […]
2001: I am sure that people are getting tired of hearing about multithreading, symmetrical multiprocessing, memory management, and preemptive multitasking. How is it really going to affect you, the Macintosh user, under Mac OS X, when you just want to read Low End Mac, check your email, and write a document.
Computers are supposed to make life easier, right? It seems like if I have a faster computer, I should be able to get things done more quickly and have more free time for important things – like talking to my fiancé or getting some exercise. But often that isn’t the way it seems to work […]
2001: The trackpad was launched by Apple in May 1994 as a replacement for the much-lauded trackball in its PowerBooks. It has been implemented in every subsequent Mac portable. It was used in lieu of a mouse in the Twentieth Anniversary Mac and is also used by the majority of PC notebooks now in production. […]
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!
2001 – Hi everybody and welcome to iBasics.* The intent of this weekly column is to help you to tame your Macintosh and get the most out of it, whether it is old or new. Not everybody is a power user who relies on the use of a Macintosh for a living, but everybody wants […]
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 […]
Red Skull: “I’m God” Captain America: “Then I’m Nietzsche.” From Earth X graphic novel (issues 1-12), Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, and John Paul Leon
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″ […]
