Please elaborate. You can’t swap out the motherboard for a motherboard you see advertised in Computer Shopper, if that’s what you mean.
But I’m writing this on a “WallStreet” PowerBook. The processor daughtercard is 3rd-party, from Blue Chip, a 500 MHz card with a 256 MHz L2 cache. The hard drive is an IBM TravelStar 60 gig I bought and installed myself. I’m at home right now, but at work I use the built-in screen as second monitor, and the primary monitor, a nice 19" Dell Trinitron CRT, plugs into my 3rd-party video CardBus card, an ixmicro RoadRocket. If I wanted to I could replace the built-in modem with a 3rd-party modem, although I have no reason to do so. I am making arrangements to replace the crappy lid “clutch” assembly which is made of cheap pot metal with a nice third-party solid steel assembly. And this is a laptop.
The thing is, Derleth, most of us just want a computer that runs Excel, Word, PowerPoint and IE (along with whatever industry-specific software we each use) and runs them as fast as possible. I used to be a real OS-meddler. That was in university. In the real world, I just don’t have time for all that crap. That’s what IT support is for.
From that point of view, a box that simply does these things admirably is, well, ideal.
On my computer at home of course I have XP Home Edition. So far so good. I’ve had no problems. But the printer I purchased doesn’t have the right UBS cord so I’ve got to make another trip to get the right one. Then again I may be in printer hell this weekend when I try to get it going.
Hey, did THespos have the fun of doing the installation of XP (professional edition!) on my comp? That’s almost exactly what XP did to me (I don’t have a game server, but a wireless network: I have no clue as to why XP wanted to use the IP # it came up with)…
…along with screwing up NetMeeting, which was a pain in the ass to deal with…
…along with screwing up the control panel, so things like ‘add/remove programs’ or ‘hardware’ wasn’t there under either XP or ‘classic’ views…
…along with insisting I install a driver ‘update’ for my graphics card that is older than the XP drivers I’m currently using…
…etc.
Gah. The only reason why I’m sticking with XP is because I’m too stubborn to get rid of it after applying a sledgehammer to it’s guts to whip it into shape. :mad:
(If you haven’t already, grab Xteq to help beat XP into submission. There’s also a tool out there to get rid of Messenger, and to control XP’s tendency to chatter with the Internet. All this can be done manually, but eh… easier to do it this way so as to not miss a step.)
Nonsense. Macs use quite standard PCI busses for expansion, AGP slots for neato graphics, IDE busses for storage, and rather ordinary 168 pin SDRAM DIMMs.
I just installed two Western Digital IDE hard drives in my G4 in about five minutes.
You can’t currently, buy PowerPC motherboards that will boot MacOS (as I recall, you need Apple’s proprietary ROM to do that) though you can get PPC boards from IBM which can run Linux and BeOS.
I’m preparing for a camping vacation, so I was looking into ways that I could dial into the Internet while I’m on the road. Turns out my Motorola v60c has a data connectivity cable and software that allows you to treat the phone like a wireless modem. After visiting 24 different wireless stores to try to find the data connectivity kit, I find a store that carries the Serial version, but not the USB version. So I figure, “What the hey…? I’ll buy the serial port version and use one of my USB ports to add a serial port connection to my notebook.”
First step: Install the USB->Serial port cable I bought at CompUSA. WinXP warns me “This driver is not digitally signed” repeatedly. When I make it clear that I want to install the fucking thing anyway, it treats me like a little kid by backing up my system prior to installing the driver, just in case I need to restore my system. That’s not so bad, but then something in XP’s taskbar pops up to tell me that something went wrong during hardware installation. It makes me perform the installation FOUR FUCKING TIMES before the USB->Serial cable starts working.
Next step: Hook up Motorola’s data cable and install drivers and software. This goes okay, until I’m actually setting up the Motorola phone as a modem on my system. It doesn’t want to give me a COM port to assign the modem to. I manage to find the new version of Device Manager and notice that despite XP telling me that the USB->serial adapter is working, it’s got the ol’ yellow exclamation point next to it. I check that out to see what’s wrong and it TAKES ME THROUGH THE DRIVER INSTALLATION PROCESS A FIFTH FUCKING TIME, after which the thing works fine. Once the serial port adapter is working, XP relents and gives me COM4 for the new modem.
Why does this OS behave like a snot-nosed three-year-old? I don’t have kids because I can’t stand putting up with whining and shit like that. And XP is behaving exactly like a child that’s not getting his way.
“Waaaaaah! This driver isn’t digitally signed!”
“No! I don’t wanna install this adapter. No! No! No! No!”
“Gimme that IP address. Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
“If you give me pirated software, I’ll tell Uncle Bill on you!”
I don’t need this crap.
Thanks for all your advice, folks. When I get back from vaca, I’m seriously going to consider moving to XP Professional from XP Home. If XP Home is a snotty 3-year-old, maybe XP Professional is a recent college grad. One can only hope.
Thanks, Fenris, for the 10.0. I may make a sig out of that one.
Another vote for XP Pro. Upgraded from ME (couldn’t wait to get that steaming pile of dung off of my machine) and the machine SINGS now! Everything works. Even the drivers Microsoft said wouldn’t work (for instance, my Xerox WorkCentre XK50c) work. Although, oddly enough, the downloadable drivers that Xerox has on its site specifically for XP DON’T work - I had to go back to the 95/98/ME driver.
But, no issues so far, and I love the interface. I was so bored with the old Win95 look that never changed. I switched the color setting to silver, though - the blue was a little too much. Not as pretty as the OS X interface, but, based on what I’ve seen of OS X, it’s a LOT more stable!
Finally, I give the rant itself a solid 10.0. Like Fenris said, it’s perfect in its application of happiness, conversation, frustration, and anger. Excellent.
Manufacturers could do what Blue Point does with PowerBook daughtercards:
• create a Mac-compatible motherboard without the Mac ROM, but with a flashable chip capable of holding that many MB’s of information
• users run a utility on their Mac with existing motherboard which copies the ROM to a file on their desktop
• on bootup, the new motherboard is set to read the contents of a text file with a certain name on the Desktop into the flashable chip, after which point the new mobo has a legal copy of the Mac ROM
If the new motherboard contains technologies supported in ROM code on newer Macs but not on the older Mac into which the new motherboard is going (e.g. – if a 3rd party mfg comes out with a motherboard for 1st-generation PowerPC Macs which has PCI slots instead of NuBus), the manufacturer would have to include an Extension that would make the necesary patch to the OS code during bootup, or would have to supply a utility that would patch the code stored in the flashable ROM chip after the Apple ROM code had been loaded to it.
What makes this legal is the user’s original ownership of a genuine Apple® Macintosh motherboard to start with.
Be all of this as it may, as far as I know it is only being done with a few 3rd-party processor daughtercards, not with entire motherboards.
Buying a toaster (a box that is closed in either the hardware or the software sense) is perfect if the toaster always works. You turn it on, you do some simple manipulations, and you have a nice-looking file on your disk or coming out of your printer. Simple, clean, and easy.
Not in the real world.
In the real world, toasters aren’t very practical. They break and then you are at the mercy of a corporation that, for commercial reasons, can’t acknowledge that its software has bugs (or that its hardware occasionally fails). You suffer dumbly while a ‘Help’ Desk rep. keeps you on hold or passes you along a chain of automated touch-tone systems. Because the code is secret, only a few isolated wizards can actually fix the bugs that are eating your files alive every few minutes. Those wizards can only do so many things at once, and only on so many different machines (something that makes more of a difference in PC world, but either is now or will soon be a concern in the Mac universe). If your sound card is rare enough the developers have never seen it, you’re out of luck if you want the audio to sound right. If your bug is uncommon enough most people can avoid it most of the time, what exactly are your odds of getting it fixed? Nil. That’s the real world.
In the real world, open-source software gets fixed by people with all machine types and all expectations. You can look for patches online, you can see if the newest version has fixed the bug, you can ask newsgroups for fixes or workarounds, or you can email the programmer to see if you can learn a workaround or influence his next round of bugfixing. You can even learn a little practical programming to fix the program (maybe not the best option for you ‘pragmatists,’ but very practical in the real world). You’re never stuck on hold while a helpdesker sucks her teeth, you’re never waiting with baited breath to see if the next version of the program fixes the bug that has plagued you, and you never have to spend $150 for a bugfix MS has decided is an upgrade.
Or, delete the steaming pile of dung known as XP and get Windows 2000, like I did. Now, my computer NEVER crashes, runs as fast as the hardware allows, and I can even lock my roommate out of any file I don’t want him in.
