Busy day, accomplishing nothing

Busy day, accomplishing nothing. I spent a good deal of time fighting an iMac DV. A Umax Astra 3450 scanner we have works fine on PCs, but hook it up to the iMac and it acts like it has mechanical problems. So it goes. Download the newest drivers and all the Apple updates, still nothing. Time to call Umax on Monday I guess.
And I’m outta here. I just found a copy of a rare CD from a band called Seven Red Seven. They were essentially a Depeche Mode wannabe band from Chicago in the early 90s, but they recorded a song called “Thinking of You” that used to be a staple of a local Sunday night radio program around 1991, and it’s probably my favorite song from that year. My only copy of the song was an incomplete radio taping dating back to then, so the quality was awful. It’s good to finally have it on CD. The rest of the album is only so-so, but I paid little enough for it that it was worth it for the one song.

10/21/2000

Not that I’m complaining in the least. It’s nice to have two days for the price of one while laying things out initially. So, let’s put some real content here, rather than “Hi, I’m Dave and I’m putting together a Web site” ramblings.

A Mac maintenance tip. Alwin Hawkins sent a tip to Dan Bowman, who passed it along to me:

My own personal choice is to burn a CD with a System Folder, DiskWarrior, TechToolPro, and the Apple rescue utilities. When a Mac can’t find a hard drive to boot off of, it will try to boot off the CD drive. Terribly convenient…

Another choice is picking up a cheap refurb external drive (SCSI for old macs, Firewire for new), load it with the tools you need, then stick it in a place where the kids can’t muck about with it.

When your Mac dies, you clip the drive to the external bus and Bob’s your uncle.

Lacking a burner-equipped Mac, that second tip is exactly what I did at work. We bought the biggest SCSI drive available at the time (I think it was a 20-gig), which I installed in an old external enclosure and partitioned. I installed the OS and utilities to one of the partitions; the rest of the space I use for quick-and-dirty backups. Before I make a major change to a system, I drag its drive icon to one of the partitions so I get a full backup, including hidden files, then go to work. If I mess up, bringing everything back is just a matter of dragging the partition’s icon back, then un-nesting the folders from the first two levels (the drag operation creates a folder with the disk’s name in it–just drag the folders to the root of the drive to undo that).

Design anarchy. Designers are used to specifying everything about their work’s appearance. So are computer users. This has been a point of contention since the Web’s infancy. (Designers don’t like to budge after years of classes and experience. Computer users don’t like to budge after years of classes and experience. Being both, imagine the conflicts that go on inside my head! No wonder I’m neurotic…) Centuries of experience have proven that a line width between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 alphabets (49 to 65 characters) provide maximum readability. Tables provide a neat way to hard-code such things.

But readers used to configuring everything about their machines (and chances are there are plenty of those in my audience) don’t like when I do that.

This time, I opted to code my site to scale to screen resolution, then I opened my browser full-screen (I usually keep it at about 680×768 or 800×768). I didn’t like it much. But then I hit the Ctrl-] combination to increase font size (I was using Netscape at the time). Then I hit it again. And again. And I liked it. Then I dropped my screen size to 640×480 and my browser to standard font sizes. Still readable without too much obnoxious scrolling.

So I’ve given up some control. But hopefully that’ll result in better readability on a wider variety of machines.

Mac data recovery

Interesting day yesterday. I talked with my agent about where I’ll be writing next. There’s a UK magazine editor who is expressing interest in my work. We’ll see where that goes. My college degree is in journalism, and my field of emphasis was in magazine editing and publishing, so writing for computer magazines doesn’t seem foreign to me at all. I actually have been published before in computer magazines, but the last time was in 1997, and the time before that was in 1991. And I think the UK attitude towards technology is a bit more sensible than the US attitude–the UK seems more interested in making the most of what they have, as opposed to the US philosophy of replacing right away. (My English, Scottish and Irish ancestry must be showing through right about now.) So I like the idea of writing for magazines in the UK.
Due to my weak wrists, magazine writing is probably better suited for me at this point anyway.

Just don’t expect me to move to Manchester, England right away. (Of course I’d choose Manchester. That’s where the good music comes from. Joy Division, New Order, Joy Division, The Smiths, Joy Division, Crispy Ambulance, Joy Division…)

More emergency Mac procedures. It should be noted that what I stated about dual G4s not booting off the current utilities CDs also applies to other new models, such as the iMac DV and the G4 Cube (assuming you’re one of the 12 people who bought one).

Unfortunately, my tip for yesterday won’t help you if the machine is already in service and you can’t take it down for a reformat and reinstall. What to do then? Go ahead and copy (once again, DO NOT INSTALL) the contents of your utilities CDs to the hard drive. When you need to run them, boot off your MacOS 9 installation CD. Assuming your drive isn’t damaged to the point of being unreadable by the OS, you can then launch and run the full battery of utilities programs to get the machine back up and running.

If your filesystem is damaged to the point of being unreadable, your best resort is to take out the hard drive, put it in a Mac that is working, and run DiskWarrior, then if that doesn’t bring it back from the dead, run Tech Tool Pro’s volume recover. (Unfortunately, I’ve had to do this before–good thing for me that I’m not uncomfortable ripping into the innards of a computer and transplanting pieces into another.) Of course, this trick works better for G4 towers than it does for iMacs.

If it happens to a PowerBook, your best bet is to put the machine into SCSI dock mode (where the machine just emulates an external SCSI hard drive), connect it to a SCSI-equipped Mac, and run repair tools from there. This is also a great way to transport large numbers of files in a pinch. This is much nicer than taking out a PowerBook hard drive.

Ahem. I see Dan Bowman has introduced me as the Daynotes’ “Resident Expert on Macs.” I suppose I qualify as that. But I’m not a Mac zealot. There are things about every computer architecture that drive me up the wall. I’ve had fully multithreaded, pre-emptive multitasking systems since I bought an Amiga in 1991, and frankly ever since then I’ve found it very difficult to live without that. I’m always doing more than one thing at a time, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to expect my computer to juggle a few things. (For a few blissful days in 1992 I had two Amigas, which let me really juggle a lot of things. These days I normally work with at least two networked PCs going, and sometimes as many as six.)

So while I’m no friend of Microsoft, I’ve probably said more critical things of Apple in these pages than I have of Microsoft.

The only computer that I was ever religious about was the Amiga, and to a certain degree I probably still am. That got me absolutely nowhere. Microsoft zealots drive me up the wall. Linux zealots drive me nuts. Anti-Linux zealots drive me even battier. I sympathize with OS/2 zealots, when I run across them, but I won’t join them. They’re machines. Tools. Do you expect me to sing the praises of Craftsman screwdrivers while I’m at it? They’re nice screwdrivers, but hey, I can get work done with a Stanley too…

So… Thanks for the kind introduction, Dan. I guess I just finished it. So if you’re here courtesy of Dan, welcome aboard. I hope you’re not too offended. (Don’t feel bad. I offend everyone at one point or another.)

Praying about depression, and a common Mac no-no

Sorry, not thinking much about computers tonight. Short version of the story: I was at church Wednesday night, and I sat near the front. I never do that–that’s the last remnant of “Good Lutheran” in me. (I’m a very, very bad Lutheran, partly because I believe a guitar’s proper place is near the altar.) I was staring off into space before the service when I happened to turn around, and there was a lady my age sitting behind me. I’d seen her at Wednesday services a couple of times before but we’d never been introduced.
I’m usually one of two twentysomething males present. The other plays keys for the praise team and isn’t very accessible because he’s always busy. She seemed to want to talk to a twentysomething male. More on that in a second.

We ended up in the same prayer team. We break into groups of about seven to talk about what’s going on in our lives and pray as a group for those individual needs, for pastor, and for the church. Her big concern: Her brother. He’s depressed. OK, what twentysomething male isn’t sometimes? He’s not very receptive to God. Again, what twentysomething male isn’t? So after we prayed, I asked her a little more about her brother. From what she told me and others, I got a bit of a picture. Twenty-one, depressed, doesn’t have a girlfriend and thinks that means there’s something horribly wrong with him.

I know a certain someone who was in that very same boat, right down to the age. He was deathly afraid to tell anyone about it. So he wrote a column about it and published it in the student newspaper at the University of Missouri-Columbia where potentially 20,000 people could read all about it. He’s a good friend of mine. His name’s Dave.

I didn’t get to talk to her a whole lot more about it because I had to go put together a slideshow after the service, but that’s just as well because I think it’s good that I’ve thought about it some. I need to think the situation over a little bit more.

Some things are more important than computers, after all.

Yes, some things are more important. Let’s fast-forward to when I was 23. Maybe as you read this, you think, “Dave just found himself a target.” Well, you know, when I was 23 and not very different from how I was at 21, some people saw me as a target, and they did just that. They messed me up even more. But there were a couple of guys who were different: an ex-Marine named Cannon, and a guitar player named Mark, and an artist/guitarist/anthropologist named Charlie. They saw a guy who needed a friend. Cool guys. All Christian, but they weren’t fake. Their approach worked pretty well.

So of course I have to change it. What I needed most at that time was to know that someone had been there before. All the rest could come later. In Mark and Cannon, I saw two guys, one of them a couple of years older than me, who’d kinda sorta been there before.

So. This could be my chance to give something back.

———-

From: Dan Bowman

Subject: FWIW (Macintosh maintenance)

Mac Buyer’s Tip: On our new dual-processor G4, the cruddy DHTML animation at Happy Cog runs as smoothly as a Flash movie. And our crisp, new, widescreen Cinema display reveals the terrible imperfections of the artwork we’ve foisted on the public for years. One freelance gig can pay for this system. We recommend it highly. But don’t buy the latest versions of Norton Utilities and Tech Tool Pro yet. They won’t boot the dual-processor G4. And Norton has actually caused hard drive problems we were only able to repair with Apple’s built-in Disk First Aid app. Installing these two power-user must-have programs was the cause of most of our installation woes.

via Zeldman: http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html October 17 post.

dan

———-

Amen, brother!

Rule #1: Never, ever, ever, EVER install Norton Utilities and Tech Tool Pro. Not even if Steve Jobs holds a gun to your head. Boot off them in emergencies in order to fix or defrag your hard drive. You have to boot off the CD to do that anyway (the OS won’t let you fix or defrag the drive you booted from), and those tools cause more problems than they solve when they’re installed. Installing serves no useful purpose. Buy them and store them away except for that one day a month when you do disk maintenance.

Rule #2: Don’t rely only on NU and TTP. Also get DiskWarrior, from Alsoft. When something goes wrong, run DiskWarrior. Then run TTP. Then run NU. Then run Apple’s Disk First Aid. Why? All of them fix a lot of disk problems. None of them fix all of them. DW and TTP catch things NU won’t. NU catches minor things they don’t. And Disk First Aid fixes what NU breaks.

To get around the dual G4 boot problem, partition the drive and install just a minimal Mac OS 9 to it. When maintenance calls, boot off that partition, then run your disk tools off their respective CDs (or copy the CDs’ contents to that partition if you have the space).

This problem occurs every time Apple changes their architecture.

Mac emulation and insights

I’m scaring myself. I’ve been playing around with Mac emulation on my PC at home (I can get an old Quadra or something from work for nothing or virtually nothing, but finding space to set it up properly in these cramped quarters would be an issue, especially since I’d have to give it its own keyboard and mouse and possibly its own monitor). My Celeron-400 certainly feels faster than the last 68040 I used, and I greatly prefer my clackety IBM keyboard and my Logitech mouse over anything Apple ever made, so this emulation setup isn’t bad. I’ve got MacOS 8.0 running on my Celeron 400, though on an 040 (especially an emulated 040), 7.6.1 would be much better if I can track down an installation CD for it by some chance.
Of course, there’s the issue of software. A lot of the ancient 68K Mac software is freely available (legally) these days, and it raises the old “Are we better off now than we were 10 years ago?” question. I don’t know. I still think the software of yesterday was much leaner and meaner and less buggy. By the same token, programs didn’t necessarily work together like they do today, and the bundles of today were virtually unheard of. Software ran anywhere from $99 to $999, and it typically did one thing. More, an outliner from Symantec (not to be confused with the Unix paging utility), made charts and outlines. That was it. And it cost around $100. The functionality that’s in MS Office today would have cost many thousands of dollars in 1990. Of course, the very same argument could be made for hardware. You couldn’t get the functionality available in a $399 eMachine for any price in 1990–there were very high-end machines in 1990 with that kind of CPU power, of course, but the applications weren’t there because you don’t buy a supercomputer to run word processing.

Messing around with this old Mac software gave me some insights into the machine. One of the freely available packages is Think Pascal. In high school, we did computer applications on Macs and programming (at least the advanced programming classes I was taking) on IBM PCs. So I know Pascal, but this was my first exposure to it on the Mac. Reading some of the preliminary documentation on programming a Mac in Think Pascal gave me some insight into why the Mac has (and always had) such a rabid following. I don’t really find the Mac any easier to use than Windows (and there are some things I have to do that are far easier in Windows) but I won’t deny the Mac is a whole lot easier to program. Implementing “Hello, World!” in Think Pascal on a Mac is much easier than implementing it in C on Windows, and the Think Pascal version of “Hello, World!” makes more sense to me than even the Visual Basic version of “Hello, World!” on Windows. It’s more complicated than the main() { printf(“Hello, World!\n”); } you would use in DOS or Unix, but if you use all available tools and put the dialog boxes and buttons in resources it’s not much more complex, and programmers can rough in GUI elements and get on with the code while they shove the GUI elements off to artsy people, then it’s easy to use ResEdit or another resource editor to put the final GUI elements in.

And, bite my tongue, it would appear that programming the Mac was easier than programming the Amiga as well. I wrote plenty of command-line tools for the Amiga but I never mastered the GUI on that platform either.

I’m not saying anyone can program a Mac, but having attempted unsuccessfully to learn how to program effectively in Windows, I can say people who wouldn’t program in Windows can (and probably do, or at least did back in the day) program the Mac. My friends Tom Gatermann, Tim Coleman and I stand no chance whatsoever of being able to develop a decent Windows app, but we would have made a decent Mac development team with Tom and Tim handling the GUI and me writing code and all of us contributing ideas.

The next time I need a computer to do something for me that I can’t find a readily made program to do, I’m apt to load up Think Pascal on a Mac emulator and take a crack at it myself. My simple mind can handle programming that platform, and I suspect some of the innovative programs that appeared on the Mac first may have originally been written by people like me who have ideas but don’t think like a traditional programmer.

———-

From: Robert Bruce Thompson

“I can count on one hand the number of people I know who’ve ever built anything from discrete components, myself included…”

You’re hanging out with way too young a crowd. I’m only 47, and I used to build stuff from discrete components, including ham transmitters, receivers, amplifiers, and so on using *tubes*. You probably wouldn’t recognize a tube if it bit you, so I’ll explain that they were glass things kind of like light-bulbs. They were available in hundreds of types, which one used for various purposes–diodes, triodes, and so on. When they were running, they lit up with an orange light. Very pretty. And they did burn out frequently, just like light bulbs.

And I’ll be that if I were pressed hard enough, I could even remember the resistor color codes.

Geez.

———-

Too young and too lazy. But I do know what tubes are–they’re still used in audio equipment, for one, because they give a richer tone than transistors. And I remember when I was really young, there was a drugstore we used to go to that still had a tube tester in back.

But I remember the eyebrows I raised in high school when I was building something that needed a particular logical gate, and I couldn’t quickly locate the appropriate chip. I had a book that told how to build the gate using discrete components, so I did it. Actually I raised eyebrows twice–once for building the thing that required the chip in the first place, and once for making the chip stand-in.

“Apple lost,” Steve Jobs says

Apple obsession continues. See if you can guess who said the following:

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost.

ArsTechnica readers may already know the answer. The answer (drum roll) is, none other than Steve Jobs, in an interview that appeared in the Feb. 1996 issue of Wired. Jobs was, at the time, CEO of NeXT, maker of overstyled and overpriced Unix boxes (though by then they were out of the hardware business and just selling NeXTStep, their Unix variant). Apple, of course, bought NeXT a few months after Jobs said this, and in a strange turn of events, Jobs ended up becoming Apple’s CEO.

It was an interesting interview. In it, Jobs said he didn’t think there was any way Microsoft could seize control of the Web (they’ve tried, and they’ve succeeded far more than Jobs probably anticipated–exhibit the large number of sites that only look right in Internet Explorer), but I found I agreed with a surprisingly large percentage of the things he said–particularly when he talked about things other than computers.

Here’s the link if you’re interested.

——-

From: Scott Vogt

Subject: Win2k On A Maxtor..

Dave,

I am running Windows 2000 with SP1 on a Maxtor 40gig 7200rpm drive with no troubles at all.

Great site, Glad to see you back!

Scott

———-

Thanks, both for the answer and the compliment.

Sounds cards, hard drives, and initial dual G4 impressions

The underwhelming dual G4. I had a conversation Tuesday with someone who was thinking about ditching his PII to get a dual G4 because he thought it would be faster. I guess he thought if he got VirtualPC or SoftWindows, a dual G4/500 would run like a dual PIII/500 or something, plus give him access to all the Mac software. Nice try.
I’m sure one of these dual G4s would make an outstanding Linux box, but the loss of binary compatibility with all the x86 software is something. Sure you can recompile, but there are those instances where that isn’t an option. And under Mac OS 9, that second CPU sits idle most of the time. Photoshop and a couple of other apps use it, but the OS doesn’t–certainly not to the extent that Windows NT or a Unix variant will use a second CPU.

I’m also very disappointed with the hardware. The dual G4 I’m setting up right now has a 124-watt power supply in it. Yes, 124 watts! Now, the PPC chips use less power than an Intel or AMD CPU, and the G4 uses a microATX-like architecture, but they know full well that graphics professionals are going to buy these things and stick four internal hard drives, a Zip, a DVD-RAM, and a gigabyte of RAM inside. Do that, and you don’t have much punch left to power such “non-essentials” as the video card, extra disk controller, and CPUs… This will cause problems down the line. It would seem they’re paying for the extra CPU without increasing the price dramatically by cutting corners elsewhere.

The G4 remains an excellent example of marketing. IBM could invent sushi, but they’d market it as raw, dead fish (which is why they’ve become a non-contender in the PC arena that they created, with the possible exception of the ThinkPad line) while Apple continues to sell sand in the desert. Remarkable.

AMD pricing. The Duron-600 is a great buy right now; according to Sharky Extreme’s CPU pricing, it’s as low as $51. My motherboard vendor of choice, mwave.com, has the Duron-600 with a Gigabyte 7ZX-1 and fan for $191. Outstanding deal. I’d get a PC Power and Cooling fan for it to replace whatever cheapie they’re bundling.

I prefer Asus motherboards to everything else, but the performance difference between the Gigabyte and Asus offerings is really close (Asus wins some benchmarks by a hair, Gigabyte wins others, with Asus being a bit better overall but we’re talking differences of under 1-4 percent, barely noticeable). The Gigabyte boards cost about $30 less than the Asus. I’m thinking if I were getting a Duron for a value system, I’d go Gigabyte; if I were looking for a Thunderbird-based performance system, I’d go Asus.

I plan to see how Naturally Speaking fares on my Celeron; if it’s not quick enough for me I’ll probably retire my trusty K6-2/350 and replace the board with a Duron or Thunderbird.

Voice recognition. I got my Andrea ANC-600 mic on Monday. Since Naturally Speaking and the SB Live! card hadn’t even shipped yet, I went ahead and put the ANC-600 on my Celeron-400 (still equipped with an ESS sound card) and fired up ViaVoice. The ANC-600 eliminated the background noise and increased accuracy noticeably. ViaVoice still tended to mess up a word per sentence, but at least it was in the neighborhood (it had real problems with past/present tense) and its speed was a little better, though it still tended to drag behind me. The SB Live! should help that; as should the newer software’s reliance on newer processor architecture (ViaVoice 97 was designed with the Pentium-MMX in mind, rather than the PII/Celeron or something newer). I await Naturally Speaking’s arrival with much, much greater confidence now.

———-
From: Dan Bowman

Maxtor HDDs

And the CompUSA down the street always has a good deal on them…

This week, Office Depot is selling Maxtor 15gig drives for $99. That’s a “Warlock’s Mirror” for a little over $200 with tax.

dan

———-

Thanks.

Tongue-tied

Anything to say? My sister (yes, she has a name–it’s Di) mailed me and asked me if I had anything to say today. Not really. I finally won a major victory at work that will result in the departure of two Macintoshes that have become the bane of my existence. The battle came at a high personal price–I’m exhausted and have little to say. Other than an observation that AppleShare IP 6.3 appears to be about as rude as its predecessors. It seems to like MacOS 9, but it also seems very willing to crash MacOS 8.6 and earlier clients. Seeing as these are 100, 120, and 132 MHz machines, upgrading to 9 isn’t exactly practical or worthwhile or cost-effective. So they’re getting brand spanking new Micron PCs with Pentium III 600 chips or whatever it is we’re buying these days. I will be very joyfully installing them in the morning.

———- From: al wynn
Does McAfee still sell Nuts&Bolts?

Exactly how do you use Nuts&Bolts to “sort directory entries by the file’s physical placement on the hard drive” (ie. under which menu item can I find it ?)

Also, what are some good web links (or other resources) that will show me how to optimize Norton Utilities configuration ?

———-
It’s in Disk Tune. Click Advanced–>Directory Sort–>Sort Criteria. There you can select Cluster number as your directory sort criteria. Under Win95, this makes N&B’s Disk Tune the best defragmenter/optimizer, but under Win98, NU’s Speed Disk and Fix-It’s Defrag Plus have features that will make them outperform Disk Tune in spite of this feature (they actually do some strategic fragmentation to increase speed). I suppose you could optimize the disk with one of the others, then try to get Disk Tune to skip the defragmentation part and just optimize the directories, but I think I tried to figure out how to do that and gave up. Alternatively you could optimize with Disk Tune first, then defragment with one of the others and not do anything with the directory entries–assuming you want to save absolutely every microsecond possible. (Be aware that Disk Tune is a very slow program, so we’re talking diminishing returns here to run it, then run one of the others.)

I haven’t seen a better resource for the utilities suites than chapters 3 and 5 of Optimizing Windows; those chapters were the result of about seven years’ experience messing around with disk utilities (starting under DOS, of course). I’ve never seen a Web site on the subject (good or bad); nor much other information outside of the manuals that came with some of the older versions. That was part of the reason why I wrote my own. I tried to explain what to do with whatever suite you happened to have, as well as the reasoning behind it.

Macintosh buying advice

What’s up with someone asking me for Mac advice? Yeah, Dan Bowman is in the process of selling his soul to (or at least buying a computer from) some egotist in Cupertino.

From: “Bowman, Dan”
Subject: Macs
To: Dave Farquhar
Dead serious request:

We keep getting hammered by graphic artists and printers; the Mac is ubiquitous in this arena locally. I’ve proposed we purchase a Mac for the GM to use (he’s a passable artist and knows what he wants and is not afraid to do it his way).

What configuration (for that matter, what machine) should I look to price this. We’re bidding another contract and the cost of the machine would likely be saved twice over by the artist fees and the GM’s time (time he could spend just doing it).

Any bets on programs?

Networking issues?

Thanks. Not my idea of fun; but in this case the right tool for the job if he can make it work.

Dan

I can’t recommend packages, they’ve gotta be what he’s comfortable working with. Rent some time at Kinko’s if need be to determine that. I definitely suggest avoiding Adobe PageMaker, because they’re abandoning the thing. Let me take back what I just said. If you can avoid using Adobe products, do it, because the company’s policies… Umm, just take every bad thing I’ve ever said about Microsoft, multiply it by about 10, and you’ve got Adobe. You may not be able to avoid Photoshop, but avoid the rest of it if you can. Macromedia and Quark, between the two of them, make just about everything you need.

If he wants to use a jillion fonts, you need a font management program, because the self-styled King of Desktop Publishing can’t juggle more than 254 fonts, I believe. I’m not certain on the number. Extensis Suitcase will do the job.

Get AlSoft Disk Warrior, Micromat Tech Tool Pro, and Symantec Norton Utilities. Once a month (or whenever you have problems), run Apple’s Disk First Aid (comes with the system), then Disk Warrior, Tech Tool Pro, and Norton Disk Doctor, in that order. Fix all problems. They’ll find a bunch. Also get Font Agent, from Insider Software, and run it once a month. It’ll want to delete any bitmapped fonts over 12 point. Don’t do that, but let it do everything else it wants. That helps a ton.

You’ll spend $500 on utilities software, but if you want your bases covered, you need them. Get them, use them, and you won’t have problems. Neglect to get them, and there’ll be no end to your problems, unless he never uses it.

Hardware: Get a 400-MHz G4, 256 MB RAM, IDE disk (poorly threaded, cooperative multitasking OSs don’t know what to do with SCSI). Frequently you can get a better price by getting the smallest disk possible, then buying a Maxtor drive at your local reseller. I know they were charging $150 a month ago to upgrade a 10-gig disk to a 20-gig disk, and you can buy a 20-gig disk for $150. Video, sound, etc aren’t options. If 450 is the slowest you can get, get that. MacOS doesn’t do a good enough job of keeping the CPU busy to warrant the extra bucks for a higher-end CPU. You’ll want the memory because you have to assign each app’s memory usage (it’s not dynamic like Windows), and it’s not a bad idea to assign 64 MB to a killer app. I also hear that G4s are totally unstable with less than 256 megs. I can’t confirm that. We’ve got G4s with more and we’ve got G4s with less, but I haven’t seen both in the hands of a power user yet.

Networking: NT’s Services for Macintosh are worthless. Don’t use NT for a print server for a Mac (it’ll ruin the prints), and don’t use it as a file server if you can help it (it’ll crash all the time). Linux isn’t much better, but it’s better. (It’ll just crash some of the time, but at least you can restart the daemons without rebooting.) I don’t know if MacOS 9 can talk to printers through TCP/IP or if they still have to use AppleTalk. AppleTalk is an ugly, nasty, very chatty protocol–it makes ugly, nasty NetBEUI look beautiful–but it’s what you get. Turn on AppleTalk on one of your network printers and print to it that way. One Mac and one printer won’t kill a small network, though a big enough network of Macs can keep a 10-megabit network totally overwhelmed with worthless chatter. Killer DTP apps don’t like their PostScript to be reinterpreted, and that’s one of the things NT Server does to mung up the jobs. So that’s the only workaround.

Multitasking: Don’t do it. When I use a Mac like an NT box, keeping several apps and several documents open at once, it’ll crash once a day, almost guaranteed. Don’t push your luck. It’s an Amiga wannabe, not a real Amiga. (Boy, I hope I’ve got my asbestos underwear handy.)

So, who makes the best Mac utility?

When it comes to Macintoshes, I feel like a catcher playing shortstop. Yes, a good athelete can play both positions, but very few can play both exceptionally well. The mindset’s all different. The ideal physique for each is all different.
I fix Macs for the good of my team. Period. Right now my job is to nurse along a dozen Macs for four months until the new fiscal year starts, then they can replace them. I think those machines have four months left in ’em. The bigger question is, do I have four months’ tolerance left in me? Hard to say.

But thanks to my pile of Macs on their last legs (these are 120 MHz machines with no L2 cache and a pathetic 10 MB/sec SCSI-II bus, and they’ve never had regular maintenance) I’ve gotten a lot of first-hand experience with Mac utilities suites.

I said in my book that Norton Utilities for Windows is, in most regards, the second-best utilities suite out there. Problem is, the other two big ones split first place, and the third-placer is usually so bad in that regard that you’d prefer not to use it. So Norton Utilities compromises its way to the top like a politician. The Mac Norton Utilities is the same way. There are two reasons to buy Norton Utilities for the Mac: Speed Disk and Norton Disk Doctor. Period. The rest of the stuff on the CD is completely, totally worthless. Eats up memory, slows the system down, causes crashes. Copy SD and NDD to a CD-R, then run over the original with your car. They’re that bad. But of course your end-users will install them since all software is good, right? You should install everything just in case you need it someday. Famous last words, I say…

But you need Speed Disk and Norton Disk Doctor desperately. Macs are as bad as Microsoft OSs about fragmentation, and they’re far worse about trashing their directory structures. Use a Mac for a week normally, and use a PC for a week, turning it off improperly on a whim (with automatic ScanDisk runs disabled), then at the end of a week, run a disk utility on each. The Mac will have more disk errors. Apple’s Disk First Aid is nice and non-invasive, but it catches a small percentage of the problems. NDD scoops up all of the routine stuff that Disk First Aid misses.

As for Speed Disk, it works. It’s not the least bit configurable, but it has enough sense to put frequently used stuff at the front of the disk and stuff you never touch at the end.

But if you need to do what Norton Utilities says it does, you really need Tech Tool Pro. Its defragmenter is at least the equal of Speed Disk, and its disk repair tools will fix problems that cause NDD to crash. Plus it has hardware diagnostics, and it’ll cleanly and safely zap the Mac’s PRAM (its equivalent to CMOS) and cleanly rebuild the Mac’s desktop (something that should be done once a month).

But the best disk repair tool of them all is Disk Warrior. Unlike the other suites, Disk Warrior just assumes there are problems with your disk. That’s a pretty safe assumption. It goes in, scavenges the disk, rebuilds the directory structure, and asks very, very few questions. Then it rewrites the directory in optimal fashion, increasing your Mac’s disk access by about the same factor as normal defragmentation would.

Oh yes, Disk Warrior comes with a system extension that checks all data before it gets written to the drive, to reduce errors. I really don’t like that idea. Worse speed, plus there’s always something that every extension conflicts with. That idea just makes me really nervous. Then again, since I regard the Mac’s directory structure as a time bomb, maybe I should use it. But I’m torn.

Which would I buy? If I could only have one of the three, I’d take Tech Tool Pro, because it’s the most complete of the three. I’d rather have both Tech Tool and Disk Warrior at my disposal. When a Mac goes bad, you can automatically run Disk Warrior, then rebuild the desktop with Tech Tool Pro before doing anything else, and about half the time one or the other of those (or the combination of them) will fix the problem. Or they’ll fix little problems before they become big ones.

Disk Warrior is positively outstanding for what it does, but it’s a one-dimensional player. For now, it does ship with a disk optimizer, but it’s limited to optimizing one of the Mac’s two common disk formats. At $79 vs. $99 for Tech Tool Pro, if you’ve only got a hundred bucks to spend, you’re better off with Tech Tool Pro.

As for Norton Utilities, I’ve got it, and it’s nice to have a third-string disk utility just in case the other two can’t fix it. Sometimes a Mac disk problem gets so hairy that you have to run multiple disk utilities in round-robin fashion to fix it. So run Disk Warrior, then Tech Tool Pro, then Norton Disk Doctor, then Apple Disk First Aid. Lather, rinse, and repeat until all four agree there are no disk errors.