Mac genii: Titanium Powerbook/OSX advice needed

In My Humble Opinion
1

OK - I am a serious step closer to taking the plunge and splurging on a brand new Titanium Powerbook. But I have a few questions before I decide exactly which:

1. 512 vs 1 gig ram?
Does OSX really need a gig to fly? At this stage I expect to be using Photoshop (maybe in Classic layer if I can’t afford the new version) but I don’t have real plans to use Finalcut/imovie. This is because I work in TV so have access to professional editing eq should I need it. I expect to be playing some graphics-intensive ram-hungry games but not that many - eg Baldur’s Gate 2 - so do I really need a whole fat gig of ram?

2. 30/40/60 gig HD
How big does my HD really need to be? How much will OSX and the Classic layer/OS9 take up? Is it worth the extra dollars for the 60 gig drive, given I don’t plan to store a lot of multimedia, and will have the combo drive to burn off excess to CD anyway?

3. The Classic “layer” thing
How exactly does this work? What I mean is, is it the whole of OS9 booting up within OSX (ie do you install it separately) or is it a virtual system contained within OSX? Would it make sense to do what I currently do with my ibook (which has OS9 installed on two different bootable partitions, so the “little” one can defrag and repair the “big”/main one, if need be? If Classic is that much slower, would it make better sense just to boot into OS9 off a partition rather than even bothering with OSX for the occasions when I’m playing an old OS9-only game?

There probably will be more questions as I get closer to my Big Decision. Many thanks in advance for any advice/information.

2

I don’t have a tibook (yet), but I do have a Blue & White G3 that I’ve been running osX on for quite some time.

I had 512 meg of ram, and recently upgraded to 640 (I had a spare 128 M dimm that wasn’t being used anymore, and an open slot). I haven’t had a problem with running out of memory or thrashing. However, unlike 9, osX will use all the ram you can give it, so if you can afford the extra ram, I’d get it.

My main partition has both a os9 and osX installation on it, along with a fairly extensive set of applications, including photoshop, illustrator, office X, and others, and that’s only taking up about 6 gig of space. However, I also have another drive that I’ve got most of my os9 apps on (another 5 gig, but some of that is video). The big drives are nice if you’re doing a lot of DV work (which I do, but I save that to an external 80 gig firewire drive), but 30 gigs should be enough for non-dv installations.

The classic layer requires a bootable install of os9 on one of your drives. Once it launches, it’s pretty transparent - you’ll notice that the widgets of applications that run under classic look like os9 apps and not aqua, but that’s about it. However, you grow to dislike apps that run in classic pretty quickly. They’re nowhere near as fast as if you’d booted into 9 directly, and they still have that annoying habit of crashing and taking the system with them. At least when they do that when running in classic mode under X, they only take down the classic layer and not the whole machine.

I usually boot into 9 to run classic games, but that’s become less and less frequent, as I don’t like booting into 9 anymore (how the hell did I put up with the crashing for so long?), and more and more games have versions that work under X.

Actually, I haven’t rebooted this machine for 27 days (when I added the ram), so I guess I haven’t done anything in 9 for a while.

3

The consensus I’ve heard is that you should have at least 256 MB of RAM for MacOS X – anything less is uncomfortable. I just recently upgraded my iMac to 384 MB in preparation of an upgrade in the near future.

I think a 20 gig drive is okay if you’re not going to be doing a lot of stuff with digital video or MP3s. If you’re not going to go work with multimedia (or you’re willing to use external drives in the future), 30 should be fine.

4

Well, I’m on one of the original TiBooks, running OS X, so here’s my take:

  1. My TiBook has 384 megs, and I don’t have any trouble running OS X and oodles of applications at the same time. Then again, you may be running hungrier apps than I do (Photoshop is pretty demanding). If the price difference isn’t too great, what the heck, go for the gig, but having “only” 512 will not cripple you by any means.

  2. I tend to run a pretty stripped-down system; even with all my applications, all my movie files, all my MP3s, OS X and OS 9, it still takes up less than 12 gigs of my drive. But, I did feel the need to upgrade the 10 gig drive that came with my TiBook to a 30 gig model when I decided to install X. Right now, drives are cheap, and you never know what you’ll need in the future; you might as well get the extra space now and save yourself any potential headaches down the line.

  3. When you double-click a Classic application for the first time after a reboot, you’ll basically see OS 9 booting up in a window. The process takes about as long as it would normally take for OS 9 to boot up on your machine, so there’s a bit of a wait. When it’s done, the window vanishes, and you can run all your OS 9 apps pretty transparently. But, as was said above, you’ll grow to dislike running them and long for OS X upgrades to all those old apps.

If you know you’ll be using those old apps a lot, you can go to Classic in the System Preferences panel and set Classic to start up when you start up the computer, so it’s automatically done as part of the boot cycle. The same System Preferences panel can be used to shut down Classic when you want to get it out of memory.

5

Cool guys thanks for all the input! Does anyone have any advice/experience though on partitioning? And whether it is possible/worth it to have a separate bootable partition with just OS9 on it, as wouldn’t that run older apps faster than Classic layer?

6

You can add an extra partition with Disk Utility or Drive Setup, depending what OS you boot from. If you partition, you’ll have to boot from CD and erase the whole disk. As for size, X uses about a gigabyte total, while 9 uses around 250 MB. I would recommend about 2-4 GB for 9, enough for the OS and some apps, with room to breathe If you plan to use X most of the time, I strongly recommend finding X versions (assuming you can afford it, as you mentioned)

IIRC, you would have X and 9 on the same partition, which is how the system ships from the factory. Rebooting into 9 takes about as long as loading Classic. I’m not aware of any compatibility/stability issues about this setup.

7

Like Max Torque, I have a Revision A TiBook with 384 MB of RAM. I still have the original 10GB drive, which I am about to upgrade since it’s very full. (Max-- did you do that operation yourself? Was it easy? I plan to stick my old drive in a firewire enclosure.)

Re: Classic-- I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works. I use Photoshop LE in Classic and was very surprised to find that my printer and scanner, which are unsupported in OSX, will work in Classic. Which means that if I really want to print something from an OSX application, I can print it to a PDF file using “Preview,” open the PDF in an OS9 version of Acrobat Reader in Classic, and print it. Of course, it would be nicer if Epson would make an X-native driver…

That PDF capability is a great feature that comes with OSX. I use it a lot to “print” things from my Web browser (confirmations for hotel/air reservations, etc.) without having to be at a printer.

I found that Internet Explorer doesn’t perform very well in OSX when I have a lot of windows open. Also, my dialup service doesn’t seem to work as well. But I have found that I can bring my TiBook to work and plug in the Ethernet cable that normally goes into my Windows PC, and access the internet through the (Windows) network T1 line without even changing any settings.

If you are wavering between a portable and a desktop, I can tell you that I used to think that I wouldn’t take the computer out of my home very often, so it wouldn’t be worthwhile to get a laptop. But I found that once I had it, I found many occasions to take it other places. Coffee shops, friends’ houses, etc. And it’s also great to be able to use it in any room in the house. And to watch DVD’s on long plane flights.

I recommend that you get a good case for your TiBook. I have heard here and there about people having problems with hinges and other parts, and therefore I treat mine very carefully. I went on eBay and bought a thin aluminum briefcase for thirty bucks, then added foam to the inside to make a nice, durable, lockable case that matches the TiBook’s appearance. It also makes me look like a secret agent. :cool:

8

I have separate partitions for both OS-X and OS-9 on my Graphite G4. Most of my work entails applications that seem to work easier on OS-9, so I stick with that OS. 512MB RAM will serve you well. If the upgrade to 40G HD is reasonable, then go for it. Sometimes it is hard to predict what new feature will require additional drive space, and, unlike desktops, adding extra storage to a laptop can complicate matters.

Partitioning has served me well and lets me segregate the OS-9 apps from the OS-X apps easily. I also have distinct partitions for burning CDs, applications, data, VPC, and current projects. The absolute best time to partition a disk is when you first purchase the computer.

Have fun with your new Powerbook.

9

Yeah, it’s not too bad. But then again, I used to fix computers for a living, so I’m not afraid to open them up and poke around. Basically, disconnect power and remove battery. Take out all the screws (set them aside in a pattern or something so you know which went where; strangely, sometimes, the screws don’t want to go back in a different hole). Slide the bottom of the case toward you a bit, then lift it off. The drive is right there. As I recall, there are two screws on the side to remove it. Careful disconnecting the cable from the old hard drive; just work it back and forth a little at a time. Swap the new drive in, do everything backwards to close it up (taking care that the bit of your case below the CD slot engages with the case bottom before you tighten the screws), and you’re done. Oh, you probably want to get all the screws just threaded before you tighten any of them down; otherwise, it might be hard to align some of them.

My new drive is also a whole lot quieter than the original drive (a Toshiba, I believe), which is nice.

Keep your eyes on DealMac for good drive prices; I got my 30 GB IBM TravelStar for something like $140 with shipping around 6 months ago. I notice now they have a listing for the 40 GB model for $145, with free FedEx.

10

This has been argued over since day one in Mac forums the world over. The general consensus is that if you don’t plan on booting into 9.2 often, there’s no need to have separate partitions. Just install 9.2 and then X on the same partition; X will then use that 9.2 for Classic and you can use it to boot into 9.2 as well.

On the other hand, you could have two partitions: one with X and 9.2 for Classic, and then one with a separate 9.2 for booting into when you want to work exclusively in 9.2. This can be nicer because when X uses a 9.2 installation for Classic, it litters it with a bunch of invisible files that become visible if you boot into 9.2 from that installation. Also Classic can (and should) be run with far fewer extensions than a full 9.2 installation. If you have two 9.2’s, one for Classic and one on a separate partition as your official 9.2, you can address these issues easily.

An excellent resource is MacOSXHints.

Have fun!

11

I think this is exactly what I will do!

Thank you every one for all your advice, I am sure once I have bought the powerbook - if all goes well and I can afford it - I will doubtless have more questions. It is great to get everyone else’s experience, it’s a major purchase decision for me, and I really do appreciate all the info.