OK, it's official. Intel has conquered one of the last holdouts: Soon you'll be able to buy a Pentium-powered Mac.

Of course there are lots of questions now.

File this under rumors, even if it comes from the Wall Street Journal: Apple is supposedly considering using Intel processors.

Apple's probably pulling a Dell.

I haven't stirred the pot in a while, so to prove that I am a professional writer after all, I'll go tackle the most inflammatory question I can imagine, something that makes Bush vs. Kerry look like a game of paddy-cake.

What's the better computer, a PC or a Macintosh?

So, Apple unveiled its new Imac today. (I'm sick of improper capitalization. We speak English, not C++.) To no one's surprise, I'm sure, it has a bigger screen. And I'm sure it's not too surprising that they crammed everything into the unit next to the screen. It's the next logical step, after the lamp-shaped Imac.

So how's it gonna do?

Dan Bowman sent me a link to instructions on setting up FDD RAID on OS X. That's FDD, not HDD. Floppies.

Remember the days when knowing something about computers was a prerequisite for writing about them?

Given my positive reaction to the Compaq Proliant DL320, Svenson e-mailed and asked me what I thought of Apple's Xserver.

On Tuesday, 768 MB of Crucial DIMMs arrived, earmarked for an old Mac G3. I know, Mac OS can't make intelligent use of 64 megs, let alone 768 megs, but Photoshop and Illustrator can--especially when used together. Just allocate 256 MB to each of them and get it over with.

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Sometimes SCSI just doesn't want to work. I tried to configure an Initio Miles 9100UW card and a 20-gig Seagate Barracuda drive in a Power Macintosh 8600 yesterday. I'd have much preferred an Adaptec card, because I haven't had much luck with Initios in the past and Adaptec's Web site has great tech support, but the user bought the stuff without asking me, partly because the Initio cards are really cheap. The 9100 spun up the drive and allowed us to format it, no problem. Then we installed an OS and tried to boot from it... Bus error. Or, if we were lucky, Error Type 96. (I've never seen that one before. I think we got a Type 97 once too.) We installed the factory SCSI drive, which we knew worked, alone on the Initio. Same result. I tried different cables just to eliminate that possibility. Nope. So I pulled the 9100 and the Barracuda and put them in a Power Macintosh 7300 we use for support. It worked the first time, and every subsequent time.

I found absolutely no reference to bootup problems with this card, or incompatibility problems, anywhere on the Web or in Usenet. The card had the latest firmware, so I went ahead and downloaded all available firmware versions and tested the card with them, one at a time. It seemed to get a little further in the boot process with the older versions, but I'd still get a bus error.

We ended up just putting the OS on his factory drive, kept it connected to the motherboard's built-in SCSI, and we moved virtual memory and applications to the new drive. That way, he still gets most of the new drive's speed benefit. Once the OS is loaded into memory, it won't touch the old drive for much. Putting more time into it just didn't seem to be worth the slight benefit we'd get.

Converting movies between different types. If you want to convert QuickTime movies to MP4 format (so you don't have to keep QuickTime installed, or to make the movies take up less space on disk), you can find instructions for doing it here. It's easy to use the Bink Converter to do other things as well, such as changing an AVI file to use a less obscure codec, or remove an audio track...

Conversion takes some time though. Don't try this on your Pentium-133, unless you like waiting.


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Compressed ramdisk; partitioned HDD; ram limitations

Mac adventures. Nothing fun. Take my advice: Don't bother trying to get MS Office 4.2.1b running under MacOS 9. Not that most people would try to run software that's two versions back on a new system, but... I guess these guys didn't have money left in their budget to upgrade their old software after paying too much for an iMac.

Now, on a PC, the answer's simple. Multiboot an older copy of Windows. (But Office 4.21 runs just fine under newer Windows, but humor me.) I can run DOS 1.0 on a Pentium IV if I want to for some insane reason, to get the ultimate in backward compatibility. If there's some CP/M-86 app I want to run for some odd reason, I can run CP/M-86 on a P4 too--it' new machines is software that tries to access the IBM PC's ROM Basic. Very few programs did. The compatibility problem you're most likely to run into is due to programs not handling very high CPU speeds well, but that's curable with slowdown.

Older Mac software is very hit and miss with newer versions of the OS, and you can't do backlevel OSs on new Macs. Whatever the current OS was at the time of a model's introduction is generally the oldest OS you can run. There's no booting into System 7.5.5 on your G4 for optimum compatibility with a legacy app you need that hasn't been updated.

I almost resorted to trying to run it in the vMac Mac Plus emulator , but I found the hard disk files too cumbersome to deal with--getting files into them is really a chore, and besides, vMac didn't seem too interested in mounting a hard disk image--only floppies. It's a real shame the excellent Basilisk Mac II emulator hasn't been ported to the PowerMac.  I've used it to run 68040- software on Windows PCs in a pinch numerous times, and fast PCs emulate the 040 much faster than the real thing. A Mac Basilisk port would be a very workable solution for running finicky older software on newer machines.

Later, I spent a couple of hours trying to get an Epson Stylus 850 printer working on another iMac with a USB-to-parallel adapter. Usually it works flawlessly. This one doesn't want to play. I got rid of the "port is in use" error I had been getting by uninstalling and reinstalling the driver (my last resort, after trashing the printer preferences, AppleTalk preferences, and everything else I could think of in the Preferences folder, then zapping the PRAM by holding down Cmd-Option-P-R at boot time and letting it chime seven times), but then Chooser asked whether the printer was connected to the printer or modem port. Answer: neither. It's an iMac. It's connected to USB. I humored it by trying both phantom ports, but neither setting worked. Then I downloaded a patch from Epson's Web site and installed it. The port-in-use errors came back. Lovely. I gave up for the day. Macs are supposed to be easier? Hardly. Maybe they're a little easier to use (I doubt it) but they sure are a lot harder to fix.

Along the way I found this useful list of extensions and control panels though . So something good came of all this.


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Compressed ramdisk; partitioned HDD; ram limitations