Mac G5

Update time.

Now the owner of a latest spec 17" iMAC G5 isight.

I decided to wait until after Christmas to see where my thoughts went and I bought today from John Lewis.

Same price as the Apple Store but I got a 5yr warranty for £169 extra (std. 2yrs JL and 3yrs Insurance Based)

Now to get used to the differences........

Congrats L-T-D.

It's a cracking-looking machine and I rather fancy one myself.

All in good time...

Enjoy your new purchase!

Cheers,

Jon

Thanks Jon

All well - everything sets up quickly and neat performance.

I have realised there are a few apps. that my PC would run that the mac can't (DVD Shrink, BT Parental controls) but I am sure I can get round that..........

If anyone wishes to share a few Mac-type tips for a PC refugee - I am all ears !

I can give you one for a kick-off, in view of our mutual friend Dev B's experiences as shared in another place:-

Make sure it's got enough bloody memory!! 1Gb is de rigeur these days I would suggest.

If you bought the model as standard then I suspect you have 512Mb. If so, visit:-

http://www.crucial.com

for a cheap memory upgrade

Cheers,

Jon

Agreed. Certainly improved performance on my machine.

Regards

Nic

Congratulations L-T-D

One useful tip is to run MacJanitor regularly. Apple has put automatic jobs on the Mac that do housekeeping in the middle of the night when most of us have turned off our Macs and gone to bed - MacJanitor does the housekeeping when you need it. It stops the computer getting clogged up with garbage. It's free, of course.

If you need a word processor etc then try NeoOffice - it is clone of MS Office and works quite well. It's free, of course. If Pages and Keynote came free with your Mac then I'd use them instead though.

Re Housekeeping tasks - if you are on Tiger at the latest fix level the housekeeping runs when the machine is alive at the appropriate interval

quote:

Originally posted by Derek Wright:
Re Housekeeping tasks - if you are on Tiger at the latest fix level the housekeeping runs when the machine is alive at the appropriate interval

Thanks Derek - just looked and noticed the crontab entries have gone.

Do you know how these comands are triggered in 10.4.3?

Good luck Mr Dead. The first thing to do would be to set ap an AIM account if you have not done so. http://www.aim.com

This will give you a user name for chating in iChat (The whole point of that iSight)

This is then entered as an AIM account in the set up screen of iChat. I am garethnaim, as me as a user and I will appear for chatting (you need broadband for this though)

Get more memory as Jon says, you want at least a gig total, another gig though is 60 odd quid giving you 1.5 gigs which will be great for your needs.

If you have a digital camera take some shots and plug it into the mac this should load iphoto to allow them to be imported.

Also if you have digi camcorder with firewire connection take some footage and plug it into the mac, hopefully iMovie should load to allow import.

As you have the latest iMacs they all have a super drive, this will mean you can creat DVDs in iDVD using your recently imported photos and digi movies.

Set up your email, you need to know your email address, password etc.

Have go a safari, goto Safari in the menu and select preference, you can turn on Tabbed browsing, and stop Apple from loading at start up etc.

ROTF

I do not know the details but I guess that there is a function that looks at the time and date and compares it to the date and time the function last ran, and that when the correct interval has passed it initiates the appropriate maintenance procedure.

I was surprised at how primitive the old Crontab process was as it assumed that the machine was active all the time.

Its probably a bit of an issue for apple as once the thing kicks off the mac becomes a bit of a dog, this could be an issue if the script starts in the middle of an intensive task.

Even so, I am suprised there is not a preference pane to manually adjust when the scripts take place.

dog or not they do not take too long - even the weekly session

There seems to be a new program called launchd that polls the directory /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and checks out the property files. com.apple.periodic-daily.plist is an XML file that tells it to launch /usr/sbin/periodic and pass it the parameter daily at 3 Hours and 15 Minutes (not quite sure if this means it tries every 3 hrs 15 mins or what). There are others for weekly and monthly.

Doesn't matter as long as it works.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/9478

This might do the job.

TBH I can't remember the last time I ran any of these scripts so there we are.

Thanks Garyl - been looking through the ADC pages and it confirms that in Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init.

There is a GUI available to create and edit launchd

Lingon

I've tried it out and it is pretty good, but as always you need to be careful if you change system files.

Cronix still works, but uses the traditional Cron and crontab.

Best regards, Rotf

ROTF:

"sudo launchctl list" shows you what files launchd looks at during boot.

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons is where the new equivs of cron jobs are kept. They are in .plist format and can be edited directly using os x plist editor.

Happy hacking.

Sonofcolin- Thanks, Rotf

Thanks guys

No need for the "old school" stuff but pleased to see the sharing of knowledge is helping others !

I will up the RAM as soon as funds allow but noted that the maximum size Crucial.com offer is a 1GB upgrade. The unit has a max 2GB upgrade potential - worth waiting or should I just "go for it" ?

All wireless now courtesy of a Belkin router/modem.

Funny thing is that I have spent more time doing things on the iMAC rather than looking for things to do with the PC ........

I'm guessing that the imac G5 has 2 DIMM slots? in which case you would need 2 x 1GB DIMM's (Samsung PC3200 CAS 3.0 DDR 400MHz 184 Pin 128x64 DIMM 184 Pin to be precise). $220 in the US. Have to be matching pairs.

You can never have enough RAM!

You can't have enough ram, but equally 1.5 gigs is plenty and after all you could get the 1 gig piece bang it in and upgrade the 512meg piece when 2gig ones become widely available (They are in production now but pricey)

Just buy a PC.

Foolproof (and cheaper)

quote:

Originally posted by niceguy235uk:
Just buy a PC.

Foolproof (and cheaper)

I thought the government were appointing a minister to stop the spread of PC.

They should certainly legislate to stop the spread of PCs....

quote:

Originally posted by niceguy235uk:
Just buy a PC.

Foolproof (and cheaper)

Bought the iMAC already. Have two PCs already in the house which were more expensive.

PC and foolproof in the same sentence ????

Foolproof PC is an oxymoron just like Microsoft Works.