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October 24, 2003

Yummy apple ()

by fluffy at 7:02 PM
I just got my G4, which is amazingly quiet... not as quiet as the G5, but still pretty quiet compared to what I'm used to; my SPL meter registers it at about 58dB from 1" away (and doesn't register it at all from even a meter away).

Also got a copy of OSX.3, which is installing right now. But it's the upgrade version so I had to install X.2 first which was annoying. So I guess I'm not going to be selling my X.2 disks anytime soon.

After this asks me for the next disk I'm going over to a friend's party, though, because I'm hungry and don't feel like making dinner myself. Heh.

7:26 I have named the system Inkling, for now. Also, Expos´ kicks ass even when it's not hardware-accelerated. Also, this keyboard which came with the G4 fucking sucks. Also, 10.3's Software Update is much much sexier than 10.2's. (It's kind of funny that there were already updates available when I first installed a system on its first day of release! It was for stuff like iSync which wasn't finalized before gold master though.) Also, setting up my account anew will be a pain, but at least I went ahead and used the 60-day free .Mac trial to sync my contact information and so on, so not everything will be painful. Also, the new finder FUCKING RULES.

I'm not sure whether I want to use X11.app or XDarwin. Probably XDarwin, since I like its default keymapping better (apple as meta, alt as alt, rather than apple as alt and alt as meta) and it supports non-quartzwm window managers much more nicely. But XDarwin doesn't have quartzwm at all. But I don't even like quartzwm. So I guess it's not that hard of a decision, huh?

Anyway. Soon I'll see how sexy Exposé really is, especially since the G4 only has a Rage 128 for now so it's not going to be OpenGL-accelerated... (oh, and dragging windows around is just as choppy as on the iBook, which is to be expected since that also has just a Rage 128)

Also, I need to find firmware updates for this system, since it wouldn't accept the 128MB of (functional as of two days ago) PC100 I had sitting around so I have a feeling that it's a memory controller issue. At least it only took 10 seconds to install the memory, and another 10 to uninstall it. (Including the time to open and close the case. Apples kick ass.)

Or maybe I'll put in the 512MB of PC133 from my Athlon and put the PC100 into it, giving the Athlon 256MB of slow memory and the G4 768MB of memory faster than it knows what to do with.

Also, I'm going to have to finally get around to setting up a personal IMAP server and fetchmail to deal with my POP3 accounts, since now I'm going to have two instances of Mail.app competing for them...

Comments

#1052 10/25/2003 10:05 am
I just realized that made a food pun for this entry title and didn't even realize it.

That's how pervasive the "Apple computer is yummy" mindset is.
#1062 10/25/2003 06:46 pm Video card
It's probably not financially in the cards, but what stops you from installing a Radeon-class card in the G4?
#1064 10/25/2003 08:44 pm
Nothing. In fact, I'm working on trying to get a good deal on a Radeon Mac Edition... AGP R100 cards (with mac firmware) go for around $35+shipping on eBay, and there's occasional ones which go for less.

I do have a Radeon 7000 sitting around, but it's not a model which has a Mac equivalent so I can't just flash its firmware (mine has SDR, while all Mac ones had DDR) and of course, without the firmware there's no way a Mac can use it anyway.

ATI was quite purposeful in not releasing a firmware update for the short-lived Mac Radeon 9700, either, so I can't put that card in this system either, not that I want to with its huge noise and power requirements. This CPU isn't fast enough to take advantage of more than a Radeon 8500 anyway, and there's plenty of hacked firmware out there for PC 8500s (but I just can't really afford $75 for a used 8500 right now). I might just look into a Mac 9800 when I can afford a better system anyway, though, and apparently there's now dual 900MHz G4 upgrades for this system which run around $600 (once again showing that while PCs aren't really as upgradeable as people like to believe, Macs really ARE quite upgradeable long past their useful lifetime). And that certainly seems like a better path to take than getting a G5 when I can afford it. Smile

Also, most geForce 2 MX cards can be reflashed to work in a Mac, but that seems like a last resort to me, since although geForces work really well for compiled displaylists and games which are optimized for the geForce, they really fucking suck for general-purpose 3D. Smile
#1075 10/26/2003 05:31 am Stuf.
On upgradability: it's not so much that PCs lack it, it's that the $500 PCs that everybody uses as the 'proof' that Macs are expensive cost more to upgrade than they do to chuck and replace. An x86 box that doesn't suck (ie, built with good parts and features, and likely costing just as much as a comparable Mac, maybe more) is quite upgradable...

Hm. Gotta get Panther now. Maybe it'll solve the mysterious Finder lagginess on the iBook (running 10.2.5 now). Of course, I'll still be low on disk space. But then, that's what happens when I sync my entire music collection between the desktop that's not gonna run out any time this decade, and the 30GB iBook. I should just keep it all on the iPod and use it as a firewire disk.

900MHz upgrades $600? Is that $300/CPU or $600/CPU? If it's the latter, OUCH! Otherwise, not too bad. Hmm.

All this talk about Apple goodness makes me wonder which I should consider next: a G5 desktop or a new notebook (given that my current desktop is an Ath64, and the notebook is a G3/800, though, I think the upgrade path is obvious Wink