John Mitchell shared thoughts about the “keep alive circuit” in the Mac. You can hear it when you plug in the computer. It keeps a trickle of power going in. John indicated that he turns his computers off at night or when he is not going to use it for several hours. A poll showed and even split of club members turning off or leaving on.
He next talked about Hard Drives. The two styles/types are IDE and Serial ATA. Both are on the market now, some as big as 750 GB. Some Macs will only recognize up to 120 GB IDE drives. The mirror G4 Tower was the first that could handle larger IDE drives. MacTracker notes all the detail about Macs. The Serial ATA drives in G5s are faster and larger drives
John noted that changing the battery in some iMacs is quite complex. Estelle has a problem with her iMac. It was thought that it might be the battery. So, John checked out various possibilities, including a system check. Not the battery. Likely a problem caused by a virus checking program conflict.
Two notes: to do a forced quit use Apple/Option/Esc. Don’t turn the sound down too low or when starting up you won’t hear the startup chime.
Ed Matlock shared the contents of the July DOM which included the following: Adobe Reader Updater; AppZapper 1.6 (removes apps and related files); blue tooth firmware updater; Camino (a browser in the Mozilla family); Circus Ponies NoteBook (freeform database); Cocktail Tiger Edition. Ed showed us what is in Cocktail and how it works. He normally clicks on “Pilot” which does it all. The standard rule is to run Cocktail and then Disk Warrior before and after installing or updated a program. Also on the DOM: Final Vinyl (converts to digital); Firefox 1.5.0.4 (browser);Linotype Font Explorer X (free); Google Earth; Google Video player; flash player; iPhoto; iPod and iTunes; Little Snitch 1.2.3; MacBook Pro updater; 10.4.7 Combo updater (installs all, from 10.4.0)MT-News Watcher 3.5.1 (news groups like internet 10 years ago, music and software); Office 2004 updater; Opera 9 Setup; .He ran the “Mac or PC User” movie. More on the DOM: tcc (tiger cache cleaner); Techtool Pro 4.5.1; TextWrangler (free); Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 (free email program); Toast 7.1 updater; and Xupport 3. Thanks Ed!
Thanks Elizabeth for the cookies!
Adjournment to the Board Meeting at Bakers Square.
Dayle Scott, Secretary