Stephen's Personal Blog

This weekend, I went scouring the Internet for old used Macs. I found some great sites that are below. The criteria was a lowest price including monitor, peripherals, and shipping, running OS X, best performance, and modem. My question, to myself, was can I get a Mac computer for my nephew for under $200 or $300.

There is some great information out there. My bible was Lowend Mac. They are devoted to low cost and used Macs. There are several writers and the articles and prices are current. The website itself has a nice, clean, easy layout. I strongly recommend reading them if you are looking at getting a Mac or even just a computer.

An older Mac is quite suitable for getting on the Internet, playing songs, or running Word and Excel. What’s really surprising is that the Macs from 2000 can be upgraded to OS 10.4, which is the version of Mac OS prior to the most recent one, 10.5. Apple upgrades the OS more frequently and with less need for powerful hardware. Most of us are used to getting the next version of Windows with a new computer, because the old computer couldn’t run the new Windows. Can you imagine running Windows Vista on a computer that came with Windows ME? Absolutely impossible!

After looking at a dozen sites, I had narrowed it down to four. One was PowerMax on a Digital Audio G4/466 that had memory, modem, OS9 and OS X, and hard drive for $220. It was a box and I would have to give up one of my monitors. I plan on replacing one of the 19″s with a 28″, but not today.

Wegener Media has 17″ eMacs for $210, but there was no mention of OS. An OS X CD can cost $25-$80. This is a major point of uncertainty. The base system could do with a few upgrades. I might have some memory and hard drives to help. There are several PC100 sticks around here.

MegaMacs had several computers. If I could deal with OS 9 there were many G3 iMacs for <$100. I don't know anything about OS 9. There were several that could run OS 10 for about $150-$200. This page lists each used Mac.

MacAttic has a simple site, which can be good or bad. They have several eMacs and iMacs. They don’t seem to support orders over the site and are more like a shingle hung out with phone and email contacts. The prices seem good, especially on the older equipment.

All this searching left me needing to call someone, which is rare. I can usually track it all down online and make an order. However, several sites neglected to mention important points like modems and OS. These things aren’t expensive, but they move the best price from one website to the other. There are some sites that have stripped the iMacs and offer each part individually. So, you can’t assume one iMac is the same as another.

I called MacAttic first, since the only way to place an order was over the phone and they offered pretty good prices. He offered a G4/700mHz, 512mb, 40gig, OS 10.4.11, 17″ eMac with keyboard, mouse, modem, and network for $135 plus shipping of around $35. That’s $70 less than their website with more memory and far cheaper than anything else I saw on the web. So, I placed an order. No need to go any further.

A similarly equipped eMac from Wegener would be about $300. PowerMax for a G4/466 w/o monitor would be $220. This is about the product/price space right now. I feel like it’s a steal at ~$170 with shipping for a computer that will run the same OS 10 I use with all the right peripherals built in on a 17″ monitor. A used LCD 15″ monitor will run $60-$120. A new 17″ monitor will run $160-$220. A new iPod is $250. Computers don’t come with modems anymore. That’s $10-$20 on top of the purchase price.

The man on the phone had taken orders for 7 other eMacs that day, by 2:00. It will be shipped out as soon as possible, showing up Friday or next week. The next step will be installing the software I’ve discovered over the past 3 months and configuring it. That should take a week and I’ll be able to study it. The fun part.

Many, many Macs fit my parameters and many websites had good deals. I didn’t want to use PayPal. Mostly, because I don’t remember my account info off hand and it’s a hassle. That knocked some eBay stores out.

My final choices came down to the following:
MegaMacs.com
These guys have a lot of old and new Mac products. There are several used Macs and they’re pretty descriptive about the problems. The prices are very good. The website is pretty good.

MacAttic
MacAttic has a simple layout; one line descriptions that flows down the page. Their prices are some of the lowest I’ve seen. For example, an old tray loading 333 Mhz for $50. It can’t run OS X without some more investment, but wow.

Wegener Media
Great prices. I was concerned with getting one with OS X. They have laptops and parts too.

Power Max
They have a wide selection. Some of my favorites are the Digital Audio Macs. Prices are somewhat higher. Models I looked at were between $200 and $300. The eMac/iMac selection is kind of then.

Operator Headgap.
This is a great site to start on. They also have a wide selection. The iMacs were a bit pricey; in the $200-$300 range for what I wanted. This page lays out the box computers.

Macs come with a Trial copy of MS Office, which is very nice, but I have never.. Will never spend $300 on Office. So, I removed it. The MS doc format is my favorite for saving stuff, because everyone uses Word or the doc format. Surprisingly, when I removed Office it left the file association alone. When I tried tried to open a file in doc format saved with TextEdit, boom “Error!”.

It turns out that file associations are even easier to change than Windows, which is really saying something. Just right click a doc file and choose Get Info. Expand “Open With”. Choose something from the drop down and click the “Change All..” button. Done.

This article has pictures.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 22 — Apple’s earnings report today leapt ahead of analysts’ already optimistic expectations. The company posted record Macintosh sales numbers for its fiscal fourth quarter, showing that the company is climbing into the league of the dominant personal computer makers, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
..
Apple said it sold 2.16 million Macintosh computers during the quarter. The market research firm Dataquest estimated last week that it had sold 1.3 million computers, and I.D.C. put the figure at 1.1 million. Dell sold 5 million computers and H.P. sold 4.3 million in the same period, according to the I.D.C. report.
..
Apple has said previously that it expects to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. Some analysts believe the company will easily surpass that figure. Charles Wolf, an independent market analyst who publishes the Wolf Bytes newsletter, said he expects the company to hit 14 million phones in its first year and a half.
Apple Profit Up 67%, Aided by Record Mac Sales

I tried repeatedly to connect XP and Mac to Vista without any luck. But I have been able to connect Vista to XP and Mac. XP was easy. Vista to XP connected no problem. Vista to Mac took a little more work.

There are some network protocol settings to modify on the Mac. Also, create a user if needed.

The key that was tripping me up was on Vista. You need to modify a registry key in Home Premium. Business and Ultimate provide an interface through secpol.msc.

The Mac is pretty much integrated. I had to go back and count how many days. The blog doesn’t have a single Mac: Day X post on it. That’s a good sign it’s in. Vista hasn’t been on in a week. There are a few more files to transfer off and it can merrily be on its way. The extra space will be welcome. This will be the last Mac switch over post. There’s a new category to cover Mac specific posts. In summary, the MacBook is great. I recommend Macs for email, Internet, word processing use far and above Vista. XP would be in second place after the Mac.

Macbook for $1100-$1500
Mac Mini for $600- $800

A Flickr Slideshow of a multimonitor MacBook Pro using the Matrox DualHead2Go.

So, I tried to use iWeb today. It’s spectacular if I were to time travel back to 1999. A great competitor to MS Frontpage which was last released in 2003 and discontinued in 2006. Seriously, who makes one web page at a time. I’m blogging 1-3 things a day. There’s no way I’m going to spend a week getting the About Me page just right. WordPress is so slick and handles so much of this for you.

In the mean time, I got FTP going to stephensite.net and it’s downloading all the sites right now. So, maybe WordPress will get an upgrade to the latest version. It’s been ages since I had desktop email at home to Hotmail or StephenSite. I had to submit a ticket for the settings. It would be nice to have Mac Mail or Thunderbird going. The setup on Grandma’s computer has this and it’s very slick. I forgot how well I set that up.

Transmit is great. Better than CuteFTP or SmartFTP. These programs can super overload you with functionality. Maybe it’s the Mac interface limiting this a bit. There was not problem setting up the FTP and saving it in favorites.

I also got Subversion going. Took a little doing and making new repositories still takes a line in Terminal; svnadmin create /path/to/repository. SCPlugin integrates with Finder like TortoiseSVN in Windows Explorer, but with less functionality. Hopefully, they keep working on it. There’s no way to create a repository or customize which SVN commands are in the drop down. You only need about a six, but a dozen are listed.

One last thing. This morning I rebooted of the RSyncX backup on the external drive. It took longer, but everything looked fine. After the backup, reboot and hold down the Alt key. Mac OS will present you with an option for which drive to boot off of. Everything was typical after that.

Wow, DirectX 9 support for playing games in XP and Vista. There is a beta. Impressive. This is the VM I chose.

I’m working on setting up the “docking station” for the MacBook. Setting up a battery backup on the laptop, monitor, and peripherals. And setting up the external DVD burner and large external hard drive.

The Mac makes me nervous about system stability. I built all the Windows machines and have a variety of hardware and operating systems for them. The Mac is unique and a laptop. Very little room for upgrades there. So, after the external hard drive, 200 gig, was installed I looked for backup software. It really surprised me that Backup is not built in. Though awful it is a feature of Windows back to Win95.

However, I did find great instructions on getting rsyncx for free and setting up part of the external drive as a complete copy of the laptop drive. The remaining 110 gig will be data.

As I type, a complete copy of the Macintosh HD is going to the OS X partition. This is the first time I’ve seen the Mac stressed. It stuttered a bit on Pandora and I filled the keyboard buffer while typing. This was at the beginning when the source drive was being cataloged. It’s now copying and stutters less often.

The XP box flaked out and lost an hour to put it back up. I was adding hard drives after I had filled them all up. The Vista box also is having problems. For some reason, it worked with the old PS2 KVM, but no the USB/Audio KVM. Even after I installed the drivers from CD. This last bit is hard to get over. It’s basically unusable now. So, I started copying files off like crazy until I filled up the XP box. And now we’re up to today.

Not a lot of Mac news. I copied current projects that I was working on in the Vista to the Mac.

I googled some info on using iWeb w/o an .Mac account ($100/yr). It seems possible using a seperate FTP program to upload the website. iWeb makes a website on your local computer. It copies this up to Apple’s .Mac accounts. But supposedly you can FTP this folder up to another website, like stephensite.net.

iTunes has gotten a lot of attention lately. I deactived Audible on Vista and activated it in iTunes. The books play well. And I began copying selected music from the big XP drive. There’s 30 gig of books and music on it and there’s no way this will all go on the Mac. It has 42 of 68 gig left and there will be some taken by the iDVD, iPhoto, Audacity, and Garageband working projects. It’s probably time to put together the Mac’s dedicated external hard drive and external DVD burner.

The Mac went to Canadian this weekend and play iTunes in the car, scanned photos, and ripped CDs. It worked really well.

While scanning the photos I saved notes written on the back in the spotlight comments. It’s interesting what happens to that on Windows. They are saved in a hidden DSStore file. Mac writes this file, even to Windows network shares. The DSStore file is unreadable to all programs except OS X. I had hoped to copy this to the Windows simple metatags. Unfortunately, this is impossible. It’s really awful that the Mac and Windows can’t read each other’s most basic metafile info.

I used the Win2K VM to copy/paste this info from Mac to Windows on the share. Oddly, Win2K can read this, but XP can’t. So, it’s a toss up how DSOFile will respond. This is the library that my Flickr app uses to read the Windows metadata.

The Mac has worked very well.

Nothing today. Off to Grandma’s house.

Widgets!

I’ve been hearing about Widgets for months. Konfabulator, Mac, Vista, Google, everybody has a Widget/Gadget host. Today, I’ll go check out this Widget thing. Wow, lots of widgets. Most of them useless. Looking for the latest deals on Amazon, Woot, etc. Getting stock prices. Checking the weather. These things don’t appeal to me. But I did find a few Widget and even new programs.

My search put me at Mac/Downloads. Microsoft royally sucks at providing a list of alternative vendors. Apple really excels a this. There are probably hundreds of Widgets and Programs. Each with a screenshot, description, and link to the download or website. I pulled about seven.

• MarsEdit that will let you write blog entries in a simple text editor and then post them to your blog.
• Wikipedia widget does a search on Wikipedia and presents a tree view of found pages.
• A Mac a Day tip looked helpful for learning Mac features.
• YouTube for quick searching YouTube videos.
• WordPress Dashboard for posting to the Stephen’s Garden Blog or perhaps to Stephen’s Personal Blog.
• CocoaConnect for getting to Network Shares easy.

You get to the Widgets by pressing F12. The desktop dims and the Widgets come out of the sides of the screen. Use them, move them, organize them, and then press F12 again to put them away. The Mac comes with a dozen or so Widgets.

I unplugged the external DVD burner from last night and plugged in the Epson 3590 Scanner. After downloading the drivers from Epson again, a little wierdness with the install, I got it working just fine. The Epson printer needs to be checked next, but it’s a little far away. I doubt it will have any problems.

I use a non-name USB adapter for SD memory cards to transfer pictures in the computer. It worked the same as Windows. I still have to get the Mac Flickr Uploader, but I’m rethinking this. The XP box has many large hard drives and should store this. So, maybe I’ll only carry a few pics with no need to upload to Flickr.

There were some excellent pics from the garden this summer. A Hibiscus with two blossoms in bloom, a red, green, white, and black Caladium surrounded by plants, and close up of a sedum looking very arboreal growing in a tree trunk. These are now my backgrounds. It changes pics once a day. I’ll add more pics to this until it’s quite large.

I like the Mac and have begun thinking about getting rid of the big Vista box. Tomorrow, the MacBook is unhooked from the wall outlet and travels to Canadian. It’s first use as a laptop.