Barney Buoy sent a list of Net News and Softare Update links.

Adaptec Reminder on Cable Lengths: An Adaptec Mac Test Engineer commented on today's reader post that disabling UltraSCSI mode fixed his external drive copy problems with a reminder on cable length limits of UltraSCSI:

"It would be my (educated) guess that the cabling connected to this users 2930 card exceeded the limit for Ultra SCSI. I say this because he mentions that he was able to turn off one of his external 'drives' (implying that he has at least two). Further assuming that each drive is in it's own external case, it's very easy to get past the 1.5 meter Ultra SCSI limit. Even with two short, 18 inch long cables, you are already at .9 meters right away (1 meter = 39.37 inches [corrected]). Add to this the amount of ribbon cable inside each cabinet which is most likely at least 6 inches per cabinet and you're at 1.2 meters. To this you also need to add some extra length for the signal loss that happens between the SCSI cables and the cabinets. As a rule of thumb I add about 6-8 inches per cabinet for this factor. That brings the total apparent length of the cabling to beyond the 1.5 meter limit (I say apparent length as opposed to the actual length to describe how long the cabling appears to be from a signal strength point of view).

Using PowerDomain Control to knock back the speed of the 2930 card to SCSI-2 was absolutely the right thing to do. Doing this increased the allowable cable length limit to 3 meters which is a lot easier to stay within.

As for the IDE drive actually causing the problem, no the 2930 couldn't care less about the source drive being IDE or SCSI but since the IDE drive was probably pretty fast, the signals across the bus were also going pretty fast thereby causing the problem to become apparent much easier than if the source had been a slower device (this part is purely my speculation).

Feel free to either post this information on your web site for others to view or at the very least, please forward this to the original customer.

FYI, I am a Test Engineer in Adaptec's Macintosh Test Lab.
Thanks for your time and effort,
John Tessier
Adaptec, Inc.
Macintosh Test Lab Engineer "

And remember the cable length is total length of all SCSI cables attached to the card (internal and external + cases). The Jackhammer PCI SCSI card manual recommended keeping UltraSCSI cables at 1 meter or less I think (if my memory is correct).

Rage128 Pro Fan Feedback: Several readers replied to the earlier post from a new G4 system owner that said his Rage128 Pro card had no fan. (I assume it was a Rage128 Pro which has the DVI connector). I suspect that just like when the B&W G3 rev 2's were first introduced, it's possible there are mixed stocks of video cards. It may be a change just introduced and only in the very latest builds, or they could have mixed stock on the new cards perhaps. I don't really have any noise complaints from my Rage128 Pro's fan (bought as the $99 upgrade for early G4/AGP owners) but there have been some complaints from others.

I updated the Pismo impressions comments posted earlier today with a note on reader's suggesting the owner disable any Norton optional features like NAV auto-protect, crashguard or disk light. I personally never enable these either and I have seen crashguard cause problems on both Macs and PCs in the past.

Reader Review: Apple Cinema Display David Saraceno of 4DLaw^TM sent a review of the display everyone wants but few can afford.

No Fan on Rage128 Pro in Latest G4: Edmond Lai sent detailed comments on this new G4/AGP system that noted the Rage128 Pro graphics card had only a heatsink vs the previous fan cooled heatsink that some complained was noisy (my $99 upgrade Rage128 Pro card was quiet in my opinion). He also includes some tips on an Orange Micro 930U card, adding an IDE ORB drive (which prefers to be a master) and more.

Feedback on Maxtor 7200 RPM Drive Temps: From the feedback I've gotten and the posts in the forum (the weekend post titled 'Staples...too hot?'), it seems there is really no issue with these drives. As noted in the posts, Beige G3 owners reported no problems, even from an owner that has 3 drives in the case. The weekend news update from one Beige G3 owner reported lower temperatures than the stock SCSI drive. I've posted a page with the forum thread to date, titled Maxtor 7200 RPM Drive Temperatures for future reference. (The forum threads are aged out and lost over time and several readers suggested retaining these comments on a permanent article linked on the Storage Topics page.)

Tips on DVD Audio 'Pop' Noise: An iMac DV owner writes regarding the weekend news thread on DVD movie audio 'popping' noises with a note that reverting to an older Sound Manager solved the problem for him:

"Subject: DVD audio 'pop' sounds

I have the exact same problem with DVD audio 'popping' on my iMac DV. Sound Manager 3.6.3 does not alleviate the problem, which began when I installed QT 4.1. I think I've discovered the source of the beastie... if you trade Sound Manager 3.6 or higher for 3.4, the pops go away. And since SM 3.6.3 didn't clear up the video/audio synch problem, it's no big tradeoff.
Hope this helps,
Nathan Alderman"

iMac DV Serial Port Midi Success:

"Many Serial-USB adapters, aparently, cannot handle Midi data, for reasons beyond my full knowledge. However, the Keyspan 'Twin' unit (not, aparently, the 'single' (older) unit) appears to work without a hitch, and transparently, at that.

My setup utilized the MOTU's serial cable plugged into PORT 1 of the Keyspan unit, with the Keyspan control software set to have PORT 1 'emulate the Printer port'.

I couldn't be happier - this success saved me from having to buy another(!) $350 Midi interface (the cost of the MOTU)!

FWIW, CompuCable's iDock II appears to have the specs to be able to handle Midi, and indeed one of their reps told me he had success with that, but he couldn't guarantee Midi compatability. Also, CompuCable makes a stand-alone, two-port Serial->USB interface. Note that (as I understand it) the iDock II has this identical interface built in to its design. Meaning, you get the same thing as the stand-alone unit, plus all the other stuff in the iDock II, although at a much higher price. I don't know if the iDock (I) has these same exact Serial inputs, but as a blind guess, I'd assume so (just a guess, though).

My comments on the iDock II/(I) are wholly speculative; The "Keyspan USB Twin Serial Adapter", however, I can vouch for, at least thus far in my 1-day up-and-running experience with it.
Buzz S."

Diskwarrior 2.0 DiskShield Feedback: As regular readers know, I highly recommend Alsoft's Diskwarrior (it's saved my drives more than twice). An owner of the latest version which includes a new Diskshield feature notes some problems he's seen in his particular configuration:

"I have DiskWarrior 2.0 with DiskShield installed and for about the last month or so, the Finder alert from DiskShield has been appearing very randomly and sporadically. Some days the errors never appear, and sometimes they will appear multiple times.

The alert says "An attempt to seriously damage the volume bitmap on the disk "xxxx" was prevented! Restart and use DiskWarrior to ensure the integrity of the disk. (8001, 1, 4)"

Then an error will come up saying that errors were found, and to reboot and use a disk repair utility to fix the errors. Sometimes this will happen a bunch of times in a row, sometimes it doesn't.

When I reboot with my rescue disk, I do indeed have mountcheck and bitmap problems(as reported by Disk First Aid), and TechTool Pro reports allocation file problems. I'll repair the problems, and when I reboot things might be ok, or the DiskWarrior alert will pop up reporting the problems....

I'm running OS 9, and using Intech's Hard Disk SpeedTools drivers on my 9GB Ultra SCSI2 LVD hard drive. Could it be a driver problem!? Could Disk Warrior be causing problems by trying to intercept a non-existant problem!?!? Do you have any thoughts as to what could be damaging/corrupting/causing these problems!??

I've ran tests with TechTool to check the integrity of my drive, and everything seems alright. It's really becoming a pain to have to fix the hard drive several times a day.
Thanks!
Mike simmons. "

I asked if he'd scanned for a virus and he said none was detected. I also suggested (if possible) he see if the problem occurs with Apple's drivers. He noted he'd sent a report to both Alsoft and Intech on the issue.

2930 OEM File Copy Issues Solved: The reader that reported file copy problems from an IDE drive to one particular external SCSI drive connected to an OEM 2930 SCSI card wrote that he solved the problem:

"Hi Mike.
This was my original post and I am amazed at how much time I sunk into solving this scsi termination problem. I tried each external drive separately with no problem, changed physical order and even changed out the scsi cables to rule them out. I tried various combinations of scsi termination but I was still stumped. I had decided to just leave off one of the external drives -- after all who needs one more 2GB HD when you have 60GB internally.

Then I saw some tangential news on http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ on the Adaptec 2930 ROM Update and G4 Sleep Mode [ In the weekend news-Mike]. Synchronicity strikes.

That news sent me to scour adaptecs web site only to find that there is a utility called PowerDomain Control (ftp://ftp.adaptec.com/pub/BBS/PowerMac/power_domain_control_51.hqx) with a manual (ftp://ftp.adaptec.com/pub/BBS/PowerMac/power_domain_control_51_pdf.hqx) that allows setting SCSI termination, selecting initiator ID, setting SCSI mode etc.

For my particular setup, I reset the primary terminator to 'enable' instead of 'automatic' [ Auto termination should work fine normally, which allows the card to enable or disable termination on the card itself depending on whether internal and external drives are connected-Mike]. I also reset the scsi mode to fast-scsi(10) instead of ultra-scsi(20) just for good measure. After a restart and reconnecting my drives with the classic termination on the end external device, all of my file copying problems seem to be over.

I don't remember that Apple ever provided this PowerDomain Control utility with the OEM Adaptec card. [ Not that I've seen, it's standard with retail cards only. Powercomputing did provide it with their OEM Adaptec equipped models, often called 'board control'-Mike] If that is the case, just maybe downloading this item might also save other naive G4 users from the time sink of scsi befuddlement.

I know that this is long winded, but I do hope other OEM 2930 users know this PowerDomain Control utility is available! Maybe some expert can comment on whether this scsi dilemma and subsequent fix was just coincidental to installing the Maxtor 40GB drive on the ATA bus.

I will wait to hear about whether my OEM 2930 ROM will ever be updated by Apple.... "

More on Clubmac Firewire/IDE Case Price Matching: Although with their current stock they don't seem to match the buy.com price anymore, a reader notes they did reduce the price for him below their $149.xx list:

"Mike,
Regarding the Firewire case at Club-Mac I spoke with Adam at ext. 4755 and asked if they would match the Buy.com price. The first rep I talked with said no. Adam said that they weren't allowed to match Buy.com's prices. He said that he could go down to $119. That was close enough for me. $30 off $8 for 2-day fedex. If the cable is included, I good to go. BTW, I purchased one of the Western Digital Caviar drives at Sam's Club and it rocks...
Mark Neal "

The Sam's Club WD 20GB Expert IDE drive sale was noted here in Friday's news ($50 rebate offer - under $115 after rebate not including tax). For more info on the Clubmax Firewire/IDE case (photos, drive compatibility, performance, price matching history) see our previous article.

OS 9.0.2 on 6400 w/G3 Upgrade: A reader notes the new OS seems much faster on his older Mac than OS 9.0

"Regarding OS 9.0.2 - I've been using a final candidate version of OS 9.0.2 for a couple weeks now on my G3 upgraded 6400. Previously, I had run OS 9 only to switch back to OS 8.6 because the OS was so sluggish.

I was also experiencing "the delay" when the finder would load at start up. Sometimes it would last as much as three minutes. After I installed the beta updater there was a dramatic change for the better. I'm ready to trash my OS 8.6 system folder. OS 9.0.2 is much much faster on my machine and much more stable. In fact, it's been more stable than OS 8.6 and it feels as if it's running about as fast as OS 8.6 was with Speed Doubler installed. It might be just a hair slower than OS 8.6, (I've not run any tests, just switched back and forth a few times and compared) but it's close enough that I'm sticking with OS 9 if only because I no longer get the finder crashes with it like I did after I upgraded to the G3 card with OS 8.6.
Good job Apple.
Zoot Daze"

I can't wait for the public release of the OS 9 update. One tip noted here previously, disabling the 'Multiple Users' control panel and extension seemed to improve responsiveness in the Finder on my older Macs running OS 9.

Pismo PB G3/500 Observations: [ Update: Several readers replied to the comments below by suggesting disabling Norton features like AV autoprotect, Crashguard and Disklight which can cause problems in some cases. I normally never run these options enabled personally.] A new Powerbook Firewire owner sent his impressions:

"After playing with my Pismo for a week, here are my observations.
It is fast. My 500 feels perceptibly faster then the G3/400 Server in my office. I am having some slight stability problems, but those could be my fault, here is what I am running:

MS Office 98 with the Office Updater for MacOS 9.0
(Office Manager never would work quite right)
AOL Instant Messenger
Palm Desktop
Nortun Utilities
Norton Antivirus
Metroworks Codewarrior 5.3
Macsbug
A custom driver I have been writng a USB peripheral (usually this is disabled, and thesystem is unstable even with out it, but I am sure this exacerbates the situation).

As you can see, a whole slew of places for compatibility issues. I can't comment on the DVD playback issues, I haven't even tried DVD playback because I have seperate DVD player right next to it (Panasonic L50), and the Apple DVD player refuses to run if Macsbug is installed.

Particularly, I have not seen preserve RAM contents on sleep function properly. Whenever it sleeps for that long, it just does not week up. I have to hit the power button twice, once to turn it off, another time to turn it back on. I think it is probably a conflict with some of my extension set, but right now I would rather just turn it off them hunt it down.

I will comment that using Filesharing over IP on two vanilla Pismos, between Philadelphia and New York, caused 2 crashes in the course of about a 45 megavyte transfer (1 on one side, 1 on the other). It did work eventually though, and both conenctions are somewhat finicky at times...
Hope this info is useful to you...
Louis "

TrueX 42X IDE Drive Feedback:

"Mike, My experience with the true x Kenwood 42x CD drive. My system is a beige G3/3669Apple Motorola Zif) minitower with 160 megs of ram running OS 9.

Good things:
booted with OS 9 CD
installed the system OS and over 2 gigs of software formatted hard drive in HFS+.
quiet
fast
no vibration noise compared to my 24x stock Apple CD drive.

Bad things:
mutiple icons could not be copied over to hard disk from a CD disk, just froze
Apple CD player showed same symptoms as you reported
Apple Enhanced CD player was much better but not without it's own quirks
Sound Jam handled audio CDs perfectly [but] using Toast 4.0 I could not drag multiple audio tracks from the audio CD on the true x to the Toast window running on the hard drive, just froze. This last issue forced me to return the true x. Such a shame. Nice drive.
Don Harris"

There have been at least two firmware updates to the 52X drive since my review (PC only updater) which I don't know how they affect operation on the Mac. This is why I recommend that if you do buy a PC CDdrom, CDR, or DVD drive it's best to do so from a source that has a easy return policy.

Voodoo 4/5 Silicon Status: MacWarrior wrote that Voodoo Extreme had comments on the state of the VSA100 silicon (can't seem to find it now as it may be in their past news). The comments were that the final production silicon is being made and that the demo cards at CeBit used a very early version.

The Owner's CPU Upgrade Reviews and Mac Game/Video Card Performance databases were updated with new entries.

Other Net News/Software Updates:

• Information on Apple at the Games Developer Conference (March 8-12th)
• Jobs takes decades to become overnight success (CNET)
• Inside Out Networks Demonstrates the First USB-to-802.11b Wireless LAN Product at CeBIt (Yahoo)
• IBM to Introduce Advance in Chip Manufacturing (NY Times)
• USB 2.0 spec two, three months away (the register)
• Using the ORB: Latest Problems and Solutions - 2/28/00
• Eudora 4.3 support page
• High-speed CD-RW 'this year' (MW UK)
• DRAM continues to fall (Techweb)
• Microsoft Office 10 for Mac? (MW UK)

  SOFTWARE UPDATES

• Softwindows update
• Non-USB Epson Printer Driver V2.8AA for the Stylus COLOR, Stylus Pro, and Stylus Pro XL.
• Intech HD Speedtools 2.7 (forgot to post this weekend)

For a blast from the past, see what was on the main news page one year ago today and two years ago.

The recent features page also lists articles posted (most recent first) as does the sidebar links here. The site topics pages (systems, cpu upgrades, etc. - see top and sidebar links on this page) also are places to check as well as the FAQ.

Weekend's News Summary

• Don Crabb passed away.
• Maxtor/Beige G3 Drive Temp. Comments
• MacOS 9.02 Fixes iMac DVD Audio Sync, Improves Networking
• DVD Audio Pops Not Just On Pismo
• More 2930/External Drive File Copy Problems
• New G4s w/2930 Have v4.2 ROM
• Pismo DVD Audio 'Crackle'
• Adaptec 2930 ROM Update and G4 Sleep Mode
• OEM 2930/Plus 40 Copy Problems
• More on Cheap White Box PC 39160s
• Plus40 in Beige G3 Performance
• Western Digital IDE Drive Jumper Settings
• More Rev 1 B&W G3 IDE Drive Reports
• UT Expansion Pack Unzip Tip
• Other Net News/TILs/Software Updates

Friday's News Summary

• Free Unreal Tournament Expansion Pack
• Rainbow 6 Column Issue 6 Single/Multi-Player Tips
• 3Dfx Comments on Mac Models/Status
• Dual/Quad Chip 3Dfx Card Power Connections
• Clarification on Past IXmicro Driver Comments
• OpenGL 1.1.3 on Firewire PB
• PB Firewire DVD Image Quality
• Mac Voodoo5 (dual chip) PCI?
• Apple Game Exec Joins Nvidia
• iMaxPower 466 owner entries in database
• $64.95/128MB Generic PC100 Dimms
• Final Cut Pro Capture to Plus40 in Firewire Case
• Audio Capture with Plus40
• Sam's Club WD Expert 20GB Drives $114.98 After Rebate
• More Firewire PCI Cards (3 and 6 port)
• More Info On B&W G3 Striped RAID Boot
• More USB Mic Info
• Other Net News/Software Updates

Thursday's News Summary

• News links, TIL and Software updates
• New PowerBook DVD Feedback
• Roger Wilco Alpha Download
• USB Microphones
• Bootable Firewire Info
• Western Digital Firewire Drives
• Ricoh DVD/CDR Combo Drive in B&W G3
• More Info on Mac SoundBlaster Live Driver Release
• Firewire/IDE CDR Info
• iMaxPowr G3/466 w/iMac Game Wizard Quake3/Quake2 Performance
• IBM ViaVoice and Headsets
• Wanted: PB (Firewire) DVD Playback Reports
• B&W G3 SCSI RAID Booting?

For links to older news pages see the Archives page.

The recent features page has a lists reviews/articles you may have missed.

For a guide to finding answers to questions - see my Site Guide page.

Considering a CPU Upgrade? Search the CPU Upgrade Owner's Survey results and search for owner reports by Mac model and/or card brand. The current database has more than 3,300+ reports and growing.