• Tomorrow is the site 1 year anniversary!
• Is it luck or fate? The site just hit the top 10 of all Mac sites on the net!
• I added a search engine today - thanks to all those who kept asking for it.

Looking at my external Raid case with the 4 drives installed, fans, Granite Digital terminators with LED remotes - I almost hate to tear it down to put the drives inside the Genesis. The other option (buying 4 more Atlas drives for the Genesis) would result in a divorce however. [8:30 PM Update]

Bottom Line sends notice of a limited time L2 cache offer for my readers:

"We have 1MB cache cards for the 20th (Anniv. Mac) and 6500 in stock. Just got them in yesterday. Special price for your readers only is $179.99. We only have 40 available and they are on a 6-week build order so once these are gone, it will be another 6 weeks before we have any more.

http://www2.blol.com/bld_desc.t?edp=22646&level=l"

Apple G3/Sagem Fix: Rob Huigsloot sent in a fix for a shutdown problem he had with that combo:

" I had a shutdown/restart problem after installing the Sagem Geoport PPP software on my G3 and found a solution using Apple's OT/PPP installer. Select Custom Install and install Open Transport/PPP Files (PPC Only). The installer installs OpenTpt Modem 1.01 and OpenTpt Remote Access 1.01. Now I can shutdown/restart without any problems.
Most kind regards,
Rob Huigsloot/LJS"

I'll be adding this info to the G3-ZONE later tonight. [11:30 AM Update]

MacPC has some suprising results of tests with the popular "quitting the finder" trick in Virtual PC. Check it out. [11:30 AM Update]

Sonnet Announces Low-Cost G3 Cards: Sonnet Technologies sent a press release with details of their new CPU card line. More information is available at the Crescendo page. (Please contact Sonnet for details, I do not have any other info on these cards - thanks.)

Although there is not a Mac version yet (awaiting drivers), NewMedia has a review of the Iomega Buzz that looks promising. They also have a review of high end notebooks that includes the PowerBook G3 (but no Pentium II notebooks).

XLR8 G3 Card/Adaptec Fix?: Although there may be no universal fix for the Powerforce G3 card design incompatibility with the Adaptec SCSI cards, a reader reports that disabling synchronous negotiation in the PowerDomain control panel solved the problem in his Mac:

" Hi,
I used this card [XLR8 G3] in a 9500 & 2940UW wide.

symptom: machine does not start from disk at wide bus

support told me: pull out the adaptec or get a different G3-Card.

after some time I discovered that the 2940UW will work fine If I disable the synchronous negotiation option in the 2940 control-panel. the benchmarks of the disk are not significant slower than with the sync negotiation enabled."
philipp

Before you consider the problem solved make sure you verify that file reads and writes are ok. Some owners in the past have reported that Retrospect backup verification fails. Speed Doubler had a verify option that can also be used for this. In general PowerForce G3 card owners should use another brand of SCSI card (ATTO, JackHammer or Initio Miles) which do not seem to have any problems with the PowerForce design cards (PowerLogix, XLR8, MacTell).

I've been so busy the last few days that twice I've forgotten to post that MacsOnly has a review of the book On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple by Gil Amelio and William Simon.(Sorry Bill!)

Linux on Virtual PC: Robin Kirmeier reports he has gotten Linux 5.0 to work with Virtual PC 2.0:

" I also had many of the problems installing Linux 4.2 on to VPC 1.0 and finally gave on on the project. But a couple a weeks ago I was at Media Play and they were selling Linux 5.0 for only $35, I thought what a deal and bought it figuring Blue Label would sometime soon deliver their proclaimed PC emulator. To my curiosity knowing I had both updated versions of VPC (2.0) and Linux (5.0) I figured I would waste the time and try to install. Having a couple problems here and there I got it installed and working with only one minor install error. I got xwindows to work and everything, wow!!!

Note to those who attempt this, only use a root (/) partition as I kept losing the /usr partition after a crash. Worked fine when I had only a swap and root. I never really got the screen configured right for xwindows and notices a few error here and there but it works. If anyone has any tips or success stories about this please email me. robin@vipsc.com"

MKLinux Install Tips: Kent Kanja sends a few pointers:

" Mike,
This is actually off the subject, but more in the regards to your reader who didn't want to repartition his drive for MkLinux... For those who have reasonably large removable media (several hundred megs or larger) the method I used for installing MkLinux was to make a single small mac partition on a Jaz disk, with 3 partitions for MkLinux (root, swap, usr). I forget the distribution I used, but that is irrelevant to my email. What I then did was install a bare-bones system 7.6 with the MkLinux booting extension on the HFS partition, and installed MkLinux on the remaining 3 partitions. Now I could start up MkLinux by simply inserting the cartridge before powering up (and didn't have to choose MacOS from the MkLinux boot screen on computer startup when I didn't want to boot to MkLinux. The new boot screen now defaults to MacOS I believe.) Anyway, just my $.02. I also used my zip drive for miscellaneous things in MkLinux since I set up my mountable directories to allow mounting of the zip.

I don't have any current info about my MkLinux setup since I haven't had time to play with it for the past several months, however. But I did have fun playing x-pilot. =)"
Kent

If anyone would like to maintain a page on Linux for the Mac here, I'd be glad to post it.

Apple's QD3D Accelerator Card: Last night I installed the Apple QuickDraw 3D accelerator card in my G3/266 MT to see what benefits it would provide. The answer was none. The card was much slower in RaveBench than the on-board ATI RageII+ and had so little texture storage ram (512k apparently) that Rave Quake would generate a warning and then lock up.

Although the card is available for as little as $59 now (MacWorks), I'd pass. Since the card was new factory sealed I can't return it. It may be of some use for older systems or for non-game use in small windows, but it's far slower than the sub-$200 cards on the market like the ATI XClaim 3D, offers no 2D at all and would be of little use to most people I think. Since the card can work in parallel to another identical card you could get more boost by installing two or more of them, but you'd use up a lot of slots and still be below the current standard of performance in my opinion. Overall it was a severe disappointment.

BeOS (Intel) on RealPC/VPC?: Several readers have asked if anyone has successfully installed the Intel version of BeOS under RealPC or Virtual PC. If you have please contact me.

In performance news on the Dark Side, Dell and Micron are selling well equipped 400mhz Pentium II systems now for as low as $2399. The 100mhz bus speed Intel 440BX chipset is used in these models.

Initial reports don't show a major speed boost over the 333mhz models, but with an adjustable speed motherboard I'd expect these CPUs to run close to 500mhz, since I've seen the 333mhz PII run 415mhz (83mhz bus speed x 5 ratio) in a ABIT LX6 motherboard.

In a related note, PC World is reporting that Intel is to cut 3000 jobs after profits plummeted 36 percent. Apple reported better than expected profits recently, btw. ;-)

Search Engine Coming: I'm working on a search engine for the site now. I hope to have it available in a few days. {Update - I posted it at Noon]

T-Shirt Logo Voting is over! Thanks to all who voted! I've got to total up the count, it's close on at least two designs, and there were three or four popular styles.

I will be announcing the winning design tomorrow, but based on responses may offer several styles in the future.

More news later in the day - and don't miss tomorrow's 1 year Anniversary!

Need Help? Don't forget to check the FAQ, Performance Basics, Links, and Forums for solutions to your problems or answers to tech support questions. They have a lot of good info and are a great source of help.

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