Mac update

iOS 14.6 just came out for the iPhones and iPads. The Watch OS was incrementally updated along with it. I'm not sure what's new but at least nothing appears to be broken.

Good advice/info. 

Once again I learned the difference between correlation and causation.

I had thought the external FireWire drive was the issue with my intermittently malfunctioning 27" mid-2011 iMac. When I removed it, all was well...for a couple days.

Long story short, the graphical glitches and freezes began to occur more and more often...especially the odd graphical glitches that left multi-colored pixelated cubes on the screen here and there. I tried a whole combination of things and was basically able to eliminate any of the external drives as the problem. And by booting up in a different operating system on a different drive I was able to eliminate any kind of software problem.

Reading online, it would appear the GPU is defective. This is not something easily replaced by mere mortals. And there's no assurance that the GPU is actually the problem.

So last Saturday I purchased a used mid-2011 27" iMac for $338.00 (including shipping, but without keyboard or mouse). It arrived yesterday. I did some basic testing of it and it seemed fine and is fairly clean. I swapped the 24 GB of RAM from my old machine to the new one this morning (which came with 4 GB). I tested that step and it was fine. I then plugged in all my external components into the new iMac (drives, second monitor, CalDigit dock, printers, etc.) and that worked. Basically because my operating system, preferences, and all my files are on an external Thunderbolt drive, I can just swap in new brains, as it were. The only thing I had to fiddle with is that my email program wanted the password again for the accounts I have. And Time Machine (the built-in Mac backup program) somehow knew that this wasn't the same machine and asked me if I wanted this machine to "inherent" the backups I had done. Just clicked "yes" and that was it.

This new Mac is almost exactly the same model. But it does come with a faster i7 instead of i5 processor and the processor is 3.4 GHz rather than 2.7. So it's faster although I can't say it's really noticeable. This faster tier of iMac would have cost roughly $600.00 extra at the time which is why I didn't get it. So I'm back and running and wondering what to do with the old iMac.

Also, the internal drive on my iMac had gone out several years ago. This new one comes with a functioning (mechanical) 1TB drive, so that's something.

Was it an iMac?



Monterey? Monterey? I'm like in the equivalent of Windows 98 (Mavericks, 10.9.5) compared to that. And yet it gets the job done. The latest OS my iMac can run is High Sierra (10.13.6). I've played around in that from time to time. There have been four generations after High Sierra culminating in your Monterey.

I had been playing around with the idea of getting a headless M1 Mac Mini just to be able to run the latest OS and stuff. But after refurbing an old HP Pavilion into a moderate-power gaming machine, there's no need for that (and perhaps no room for it either). I've got six computer stations in my office plus several gaming consoles connected to this and that. But they are all older machines.

Still, I get my fix on the latest Apple stuff via my iPad Pro. But I'd love to check out Monterey.

I never use any of the Apple stuff...perhaps for different reasons. Some of it may be very good for all I know (although I do use the basic Text Edit program). The thing is, I already have the Adobe products for page layout, etc.

I've got Excel (an old version) on my Windows 10 machine. Used it the other day (a very rare occasion) to make a database of names for a client. We just did a nice order of 95 business cards and needed to sort of do an inventory.

The Retina iMacs are the cream of the crop...until the new spiffy 27" (maybe 32"?) M(x) iMacs come along. But obviously (I was going on 10-1/2 years with the one I had) these iMacs are very useful for a good long time.

About the only reason I can see needing more speed is if you are an obsessive or entrepreneurial (one and the same?) YouTuber who needs to rip and compose a lot of videos. Rendering speed is everything for these guys. But for 2D graphics software, anything faster would be overkill to some extent. Even on old machines, if you simply swap in an SSD for a mechanical hard drive, you'll get instant and major speed improvements in day-to-day tasks.

Oh...my brother was messing around in Garage Band the other day on his phone. You can do some pretty nifty stuff with that.

The Mac Retro Museum has had a recent update. A friend is in the middle of a move and is downsizing. Yesterday, she (and her husband) gifted me a very good condition PowerBook G4 867, otherwise known as the "Titanium." (stock photo)



It has a few scratches on the bottom, but other than that it's in very good condition. These models were known for the paint chipping off the Titanium metal but I see none of that. This specific model (the 867 MHz version) was made between 2002 and 2003. Apple made a 1.67 GHz version through January 2006 when the whole line was then replaced by whatever laptop series came next.

The PowerBook came with OS 10.3 (Panther) on it. I upgraded it to 10.4 Tiger and sucked down all the subsequent updates. I had first tried installing 10.5 Leopard but was told by the installer that I didn't have enough RAM. And that is an issue with this machine. It has only 256 MB of RAM installed which is barely (barely) sufficient to run any version of OS X. I have a 500 MB stick of compatible PC133 SDRAM coming. It cost only $12.95 which isn't bad. But back in the day, RAM would have cost a lot more. I tried putting a stick of PC100 RAM into it. The computer booted up (thus I assumed the memory would work) but the PowerBook simply reported that memory slot 2 was empty. I figured if the memory didn't work with it, it would freeze the machine.

The proper thing to do would be to wipe this thing clean and reinstall the operating system fresh. But she's got Microsoft Office on this and I want to play around with that first. She's also got some Norton Utilities on this. I'm not sure I want or need that but I thought I'd check them out first.

I'll likely upgrade no further (fresh install or otherwise) than OS 10.4 Tiger. Tiger was the last version of OS X that had the Classic mode (and that also allowed you to boot directly into OS 9), although I think you could have OS 9 installed on another partition and could boot into that even if you had OS 10.5 Leopard installed (which lacks support for the Classic mode within OS X).

A dedicated refurbisher would swap the internal drive for a 120 GB SSD to replace the internal 40GB drive which would cost about $100.00. I'm not sure I'll be making enough use of this machine in order to justify that. It would also be spiffy to get a new battery. The one installed in the PowerBook is completely shot. A new battery costs about $122.00. But considering you get only about 3.5 hours out of them, I don't quite see the point. This PowerBook isn't likely going to be traveling anywhere but onto the top of a desk.

The PowerBook comes with a couple USB 1.0 ports, FireWire (400), and a DVI port for hooking up an external monitor (mirrored or as a second screen) at up to 2048x1536 res9lution. I will say that the 15" TFT 1440x960 display looks very good. I don't believe this machine got a lot of use so everything is more or less like new.

Accept that, for some reason, the back-light for the keyboard doesn't work. I've searched solutions all over the web but none of them have worked. Oh well.

That Osbourne is cool. Luggable more than portable, as they say.


I opened the computer first just to make sure the drive online looked the same (even though it was advertised for a PowerBook Titanium). Just a fun little project that perhaps might get this thing up and running well. We'll see. But no great investment. And, if it works, I could always resell it on eBay, although I'm sure I'll probably keep it...if it works. If it doesn't work I'll hand it over to my brother to sell as a parts machine on eBay.

I have one of these myself. It runs on Windows 7. The CPU is an Intel Atom Processor N450. 1.66 Hz, 512KB Cache. 1 GB memory. Storage is 250GB HDD.  A nice little laptop, but I don't use it at all these days. 

The 512 MB stick of RAM (to add to the existing 256 MB) for the PowerBook Titanium came today. Was is the right type? You never really know until you try it.

Meanwhile, remember that the hard drive on this thing went kaput. And I can guess why. Although the computer booted just fine (with some caveats...it couldn't remember its startup disk) when I got it, it went kaput at the end of the process of upgrading the system (from Panther to Tiger). That's a laborious process with a lot of hard drive disk grinding necessary, especially when at the end of the procedure the search program, Spotlight, needs to index the entire drive.

Add into this that the computer was operating with only 256 MB of RAM. This is just barely enough to run it. But that small block of RAM means that, at least for this computer using OS X, it makes abundant use of the swap file. And that means a lot more hard drive reads and writes.

So I think this process of upgrading the operating system simply sent an already old HD over the edge. But what to do until the new hard drive comes?

Well, I had another project going a couple years ago. I was trying to upgrade my PowerBook G3 with a solid state drive (SSD). I bought all the hardware for it but it just wouldn't work, no matter how many times I tried. It should have worked. But it didn't.

So I later tried this 2.5" SSD drive in my Power Mac G4 (MDD..."mirrored drive door") desktop using the appropriate 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter. (None of this tech stuff was obvious to me at the time. I had to do a lot of research. Laptops typically use 2.5" drives and desktops use 3.5". You can use a laptop drive in a desktop but you'll likely need an adapter because the pin size/spacing is different on the 3.5" drives.)

It worked. I had been consulting a techie throughout this process. He still insisted this SSD should work with the PowerBook G3. But it just never did. He just assumed it was my fault. Frankly, this guy could be obnoxious...and helpful at the same time.

So I had this 120 GB SSD installed inside my PowerMac G4 desktop machine. I cloned one of my 10.4.11 (Tiger) installations onto it and it booted just fine. So there is obviously some difference in the internals between the PowerBook G3 and this G4 desktop.

But the Titanium PowerBook that I just got from my friend is a G4 as well. It got me to thinking that maybe the SSD I was using in the Power Mac G4 would work with this new PowerBook G4 as well. So I swapped it in. It certainly was the right size and all the connections matched up to the old (broken) drive.

So I put this new 120 GB SSD drive in and installed the 515 MB memory. I was half expecting smoke. I turned it on and got a boot screen (which shows a gray Apple logo on a gray background). I walked across the room to put something away. I was in no hurry and was expecting that if this booted at all, it would take forever. But I walked back a few seconds later and the PowerBook G4 was already booted fully into the desktop.

Wow. Not only did that work but the booting process was lighting fast...no doubt due to having more RAM and especially that SSD. Frankly, I wasn't sure that an installation of OS X (Tiger) for a desktop machine would work on a laptop. There are differences and (I think) OS X (at least OS 9 used to) installs different components depending on what machine you are installing it on.

Or maybe not because it seems to work fine. And there's no need to do any updates or anything because this was a completely updated (thus latest and last) version of OS X Tiger (10.4.11).

I'm not bragging. You should see how often these things don't work out without a lot of struggle. But this time (certainly due to some experienced gained prior) it did.

The computer runs fairly fast. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with it. Having been given this as a gift, I shouldn't sell it. I kind of like having one of these. But it's probably worth a couple hundred dollars or now. One almost exactly like mine (but without the installed SSD) is going for $275.00 on eBay.