" Hi Mike,
I just bought a Dual 1.25 GHz tower from the Apple store and wanted to share my impressions with your readers. This computer is very quiet, and just a low hum of the fan can be heard during routine use. I upgraded the hard drive myself to the 120gb Western Digital with 8mb jumbo buffer, removing the stock 80gb Seagate drive for a Firewire enclosure.
I am upgrading from Rev, 1 B&W G3 350 and was astonished to see the hard drive mounted vertically, rather than horizontally like the G3. Reading how to install a hard drive into this unit, Apple fails to mention there is a screw holding the carrier to the chassis. (That omission was noted here last August - the printed manuals must not have been updated.-Mike) ...
Quickbooks 5.0 is on the hard drive, not on a cd. This unit has the combo drive and yet iDVD was on the hard drive with the rest if the iLife suite. iDVD will not launch though, it recognizes no DVD burner capability exists. Everything is quite snappy, and people should not put off buying one cause the noise issue is gone on these 2003 towers. Also, my wife is a teacher so the education discount that saved me $100.00 on the purchase. Those who want Quickbooks should know it is only being bundled with the Retail towers, not towers from the online Education store. The folks at the Somerset Mall, Troy, Michigan allowed me to get the Retail tower with the Quickbooks and get the education discount, yea!
When setting up the western digital hard drive, I found out that the Retail Jaguar CDs are useless, this machine is too new to use those. You have to use the software restore cd's that come with the computer. I have not had time to do any benchmarks yet, maybe next week I will post some for everyone.
Fred "

For some photos of the new 2003 G4 MDD interior changes, see this Macwelt page (german). As mentioned here last winter, there's a website dedicated to the MDD G4 noise at www.g4noise.com.

" Mike:
Picked up iLife last night for my Dual G4 450 - recently updated with a Pioneer DVR-105 drive. I had no previous version of iDVD on the unit.

The install was flawless until the required Restart at the end of the install, and then the system crashed. I restarted, and the system took an extra 2 minutes to come back up, but the software works great!
Thanks for the greatest Mac site!
John
San Diego "

So this should put the rumors of not working with other than OEM superdrives, etc. to rest. (I'm sure this is an internal drive, for those that wondered if iDVD3 works with external models - I'd never expect that it would, but will test for that when my copy arrives next week.)
(Update - See this page for the latest reports from iDVD3 with retail supedrives.)

"Hi Mike,
I was able to get a linksys wireless-G (802.11g) card to work on my Lombard powerbook! I knew the Airport chipset was a Broadcom chipset, in fact, the same chipset that linksys uses in their wireless-G products.

Today I got my Airport Extreme base station, but I only have a lombard laptop, which doesn't support Airport Extreme directly. The CD that came with the airport extreme contains the /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirport2.kext, which is the driver for the wireless card in the new Airport Extreme enabled desktops and laptops.

The new apple cards are on a PCI bus (with some weird connector I'm sure), but a PCI bus is a PCI bus. CardBus cards are also PCI cards, so it seems that with the same chipset/bus, the apple drivers should work just fine with the Linksys WPC54G. In fact, they do if you play some tricks on Mac OSX.

Here are the steps to make this work:
First, you need to find out the PCI name of your linksys card. To do this, you need the terminal:

ioreg -l | less > ~/devices.txt

This will create a file called devices.txt in your home directory. Open this with your favorite editor and search for "Broadcom". This is the linksys PC card you put in your PC. If you look closely at the following lines, you will see something that says:

"compatible" = <"pci1737,4320", "pci14e4,4320", "pciclass,028000">

Now copy that first pci1737,4320 (it could be different on your machine, i'm not a PCI expert...is this number static for the card?). Now:

cd /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirport2.kext/Contents

edit the file Info.plist
Change "Broadcom PCI" to "Broadcom 802.11b CardBus" then change the <string>pci....</string>
by pasting in the pci stuff you copied from the ioreg output.

Now load the kernel module by doing a
kextload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirport2.kext

Now run the Apple airport admin utility to configure your airport base station! Internet Connect may work at this point as well.

This is a bit rushed, and I'm sure somebody will put this together into a nicer package or applescript (I don't have the time), but the point is, you can add airport extreme to your older powerbook for $70! Thanks to Nick Sayer, who helped me get this going....
Good luck!
Charles Archer"

"Mike,
I downloaded the 1.4 patched (Mac Ghost Recon 1.4 update and copied the Island Thunder Expansion Pack mod from VPC to the Ghost Recon mac folder, and everything seems to be fine (program loads properly, the new skins are available, properly drawn graphics), EXCEPT for a graphical error with the map textures. This is expected, because the Island Thunder pack is made for 1.3.5, not 1.4.
It works pretty well anyway.
Peter Z"

I asked Peter if he'd checked for an update to the expansion pack but a reader replied to the above with a note on the reason for the problems seen:

" Mike,
The reason Island Thunder behaves improperly isn't because of the revision number, the PC is at version 1.4 as well, it is because Ghost Recon for the Mac is a Carbon app and only accepts filenames up to 32 characters in length. The textures are simply not being loaded. If the user checks the ike.log file after loading one of the offending maps it will contain the names of the offending files.
(name withheld by request) "

" Dan,
Thank you for contacting El Gato Customer Support.
As you know, right now Safari is not compatible with TitanTV. This is due to how Safari handles ASP files.

According to our testing, if you try to schedule a program with EyeTV while using Safari, then the file handling for ASP files will be adversely affected for all browsers on your computer, and there's no way I know of to fix it (that is, to make things work as expected with IE, or Mozilla, etc.). Instead of downloading .tvpi or .tvvi files for use by EyeTV (those files are what populate your EyeTV Programs window), Safari will set all browsers to download ASP files, and set them to open up with Apple System Profiler. This behavior is clearly erroneous.

Did you experience this same bug when you use Internet Explorer or another browser besides Safari with TitanTV? If so, then please report it to Apple, so they will do something about a fix.

Now, as for the larger point of your letter, which was user choice in what browser to use with the Guide button and TitanTV....

Internet Explorer was hard-coded to the Guide buttons when EyeTV was made, because at that time it was the only browser with full compatibility with TitanTV. Furthermore, the way that IE interacts with com.apple.internetconfig.plist (the internet configuration prefs) made it easy to set the TitanTV mime types - that's what allows for the downloaded files to automatically interact with EyeTV.

In any case, many current browsers like Mozilla seem to work fine with TitanTV, and if you launch them separately and go to TitanTV, program files will be automatically downloaded to EyeTV, as expected. Of course, you have to setup the Mime types by using IE at least once, so that com.apple.internetconfig.plist will be updated. While the Guide buttons currently launch IE, you can simply avoid them and use another browser of your choosing.

Our engineers are looking into how to best change the way the Guide button works, so that it will do things like respect your default browser settings, detect whether a browser is compatible, or simply allow you to override IE and set another browser in the EyeTV Preferences. I'm not sure exactly how things will be adjusted, but hopefully such a change can be implemented soon.

I'm sorry about any inconvenience this issue may cause you. Thank you for your patience.
Nick Freeman
El Gato Customer Support"

he's Dan's original mail (to Elgato)

" Hello El Gato, xlr8yourmac.com, and TitanTV.com,
My name is Dan Bedford, and I own an EyeTV and use TitanTV.com to "watch now" and record programs through the online cable schedule. Before Safari, I had to use Internet Explorer to use TitanTV.com with my EyeTV. TitanTV's services do not work with Safari. As Safari is my browser of choice, I don't want to be forced to use the slower Mac version of IE to use TitanTV's services. I feel that a vast majority of EyeTV users, since it is Mac only, will be using Safari as their browser, and will want TitanTV to work for them. Safari has been a huge success for Apple as there have been over 1 million downloads since its introduction at Macworld SF on January 7th, less than 1 month ago. Not to mention Apple reported 500,000 downloads on January 10th, 3 days after the introduction.
So, what does this mean? TitanTV needs to make their site compatible for Safari (no)? Maybe El Gato software will switch what site they direct their customers to when they set up their EyeTV (shouldn't be necessary)? Is their even another site that does this? To my knowledge there isn't. Hopefully, this problem is already being addressed and I have nothing to worry about. I find TitanTV's services a great addition to my EyeTV and it really makes the whole experience of having a PVR for my Mac all the more enjoyable. Thank you to all those involved at El Gato, for SUCH a great product, and TitanTV, for such a great service for such a great price, FREE! Thank you to xlr8yourmac.com making a site that really shows what the Mac community is all about: sticking together and helping each other out. Thank you to Apple for continuing ongoing innovation with their new browser.
Best Regards,
Dan Bedford"

I don't own an EyeTV but asked Dan if he had used Safari's bug reporting to let Apple know about the issue with titantv.com (he had). There were some past comments on the EyeTV reports page here on using Watson (shareware) with EyeTV for scheduling also.

• Other World Computing G4/450 in Beige G3 (rated 10)
• PowerLogix G4 1GHz Dual in G4/400 AGP (rated 10)
• PowerLogix G4/800 in G4/350 AGP (rated 5)
• Sonnet G4/800 in Genesis (rated 10)
• Sonnet G4/800 in G4/400 AGP (not rated)
• Sonnet G4/800 in G4/400 AGP (rated 9)
• Sonnet G4/1GHz in G4/450 AGP (rated 10)

(Warning - Overclocking may not be reliable and could lead to hardware failure or corrupted data.) You can find the full reports by searching the database selecting the indicated Mac model and upgrade card brand/type. If you've upgraded the CPU on your Mac, please post an entry in the database. Search the database for entries from most every upgradable Mac model *before* you buy. (Searchable by mac model/upgrade brand). For detailed reviews with performance tests and install tips, see the CPU Upgrades page.)

PenDrive:
• USB I-206PDisk 128MB used w/G4 AGP (OS X)
  (listed under "other" brands)
  
  DVD-R DVD Recorder Drives:
• IDE Pioneer DVR-105 in G4/AGP (OS 9.2)
  (using PioneerCDR burn support file in FAQ here)
  
  Combo DVD+CDR Drives:
• IDE Toshiba SD-R1312 (32x10x40x +16x DVD-ROM) in Dual G4 (OS X)
  
  IDE CDRW Drives:
• Lite-On LTR-52246S (52x24x52) in Dual G4 DDR (OS X)
• Lite-On LTR-48246S (48x24x48) in G4/AGP (OS X)
• LG GCE-8481B (48x24x48x) in B&W G3 (OS X)
  (noted not bootable. used burn support plugin from FAQ here)
  (FYI - Illustrated CD drive install guide here covers G4 towers up to the Digital Audio Model, Beige G3 MT, B&W G3 and 8600/9600 Macs.)
• Yamaha F1 (44x24x44x) in Dual G4 DDR (OS X)
  
  Firewire CDRW Drives:
• Lite-On LTR-52246 (52x24x52x) in FW case used w/G4 AGP (OS X)
  (2nd report on problems with early Pyro FW case and this drive.)
• Lite-On 48x24x28 in FW case used w/iBook 2001 (OS X)
  (didn't note model number)
• Sanyo BP1500P (24x10x40) used w/G4/AGP (OS X)
  
  IDE Hard Drives:
• IBM 120GXP 80GB in B&W G3 (OS 9.2)
  (Illustrated guide to adding a 2nd HD here in B&W G3 rev2 and G4 towers up to the QuickSilver models.
  IDE articles page RAID section has an illustrated guide for adding 2 more drives in the side bays.)
• Maxtor 30GB in Beige G3 using IDE PCI card (OS 9.2)
  (Beige G3 MT illustrated HD upgrade guide here)
• Seagate Barracuda IV 80GB in Umax J700 (OS 8.6)
  
  SCSI Hard Drives:
• Hitachi DK32DJ-36MW 36GB in 7200 (OS 9.1)
  (not clear if a report or a question about this drive)

You can find full owner reports (latest shown first) by searching the database by drive/brand/interface/mac models (the latest reports are shown first in searches). For guides to installing CD/CDRW/DVD drives or Hard drives in many mac models, see the IDE Articles page. The Firewire articles page also has guides on case kits, installing drives, etc.
If you've added a IDE, SCSI, Firewire or USB hard drive, CDRW, tape drive, etc. make sure you add a report to the database. (If you post an updated entry - make sure you use the same name, etc. as you did before so I can find your past entry. Thanks.)
(Incomplete entries are deleted. Do not post questions in the database, it's for drive reports not questions on what drive to buy - for that try searching the database for reports from owners of your mac model on the drive type/brand/interface, etc. you're interested in.)

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