AAM: Three’s a Crowd
With the release of the iPhone taking up all the blogging time of virtually everyone around the web at the minute, it’s easy to forget that there are other things going on in the Mac world, and unfortunately for three particular users, problems are occurring that just can’t seem to be solved. Which is where the readers of AppleMatters come into play.
Speaker Genius Required
Is there anyone out there with knowledge of speaker systems able to help S-E-P-T-A? Just recently, S-E-P-T-A decided to buy a 5.1 speaker system for his iMac G5, only to find that they have failed to work. As we all know, the iMac doesn’t have a surround sound card built in so the only real way to go about setting up a 5.1 system would be to connect the iMac to a decoder system, and onto the 5 speakers and subwoofer, via the audio-out port on the back of the iMac. S-E-P-T-A decided to try connecting via USB but is currently having no joy.
Hello
I’m planning to install 5.1 speakers in my iMac. But since iMac soundcard is not 5.1 ready, i don’t know what is the best, and cheapest way to install the speakers.
Creative external sound blaster is probably some of the way that i can do, but the site didn’t mention if i it could be installed in the Mac or not.
So please tell me which external sound card that could be installed in Mac.
Thank you
Here’s to hoping someone out there can offer some advice by checking out the post here.
Fix My Printer
Printers are the simplest of devices that connect to a computer system, so why is it that they present some of the most challenging issues? One user, Steyn, has tried installing his HP 840C printer on his new MacBook Pro, only to find that pages are being printed with pictures half appearing on his sheet of paper. A diagnostic test shows everything is 100% okay, yet the issue still arises.
Are there any printer-tech heads out there that can help Steyn? If so, leave a comment below or post a reply in his post on the forums.
Hi All. This is my first post here. I have just bought a new Macbook Pro 15”. (2.4GHz CPU, 2GRAM, 160 G HDD etc. etc.) Problem is that i cannot print anything. I have installed the latest drivers for the hp Deskjet 840C and I get prints with only the top half of the font as well as pages and pages of one or two lines per page. A print test goes 100% Ok though. I am a bit desperate and surprised as I never had a DAYS’ trouble with my old powerbook G4?!!
Any advise would be appreciated..
Steyn
Windows XP on a Mac—Easy ride? Nah!
Bermudez just recently installed Windows XP on a partition on his Mac, only to find during the installation process that he has lost his CD-key, thus not being allowed to progress through the installation process. Bermudez wants to get back onto his Mac partition but finds that every time he starts up, the Windows XP installation continues.
If my memory serves me correctly, booting up whilst holding down the “C” key shows a list of bootable partitions on your hard drive and allows you to select which one you wish to use.
Leave your answer to his question in the comments field below or in the post, Please help me undo what may have been done.
I have a new 17” macbook pro. I just tried installing XP without realizing I didn’t have the 25 digit code for my installation disk. I am now stuck in install mode and cannot get out. The computer guided me through most of it. The one thing that concerned me was deleting a partition so XP would have a place to go. Did I erase all of the Tiger software in doing so? How can I get back to normal?
Hopefully we can get a few answers to some of these questions and have them featured on AAM next week. Until then, ciao!
Have a technical question? Drop by our dedicated forums and leave a message. You’re sure to get a reply from one of our regular readers or even a member of our staff.
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Comments
For 5.1 speaker solution, I suggest checking out Griffin FireWave; I haven’t used it myself (and it’s probably not the cheapest solution), but apparently it’s designed specifically for Mac and provides exactly that functionality, using FireWire port instead of USB.
As for Win XP installation issue, I’m afraid the user has indeed erased the very partition which Mac OS X is installed on. The easiest way to undo the damage would be, I’m afraid, to just re-install Mac OS X from the installation DVD.
Just adding to my previous comment, what he should have done instead is either to use BootCamp (for resizing the Mac OS partition to create a secondary partition, on which you can install Windows), or to use Parallels / VMWare.
Oh, for heaven’s sake!
First, the article clearly says that he installed Windows on a partition and forgot the CD key - where in the world do you get information that makes you think he wiped out his OS X partition?
Second, the author of the article (or the reader) could have simply searched for “startup key” (on Google the 2nd link is what you want) to find out what the startup key is to pick a startup disk. For those who’d rather read it here than on one of the several hundreds other sites that say: it’s Option (not the C key - that’s to boot of of a CD).
Asking readers answers to opinion questions or difficult questions I can see, but this was a little silly.
If you’ve ever installed Windows XP on a disk with an existing OS (rather than a brand-new disk), you’d have been able to recognize exactly what “one thing that concerned me was deleting a partition so XP would have a place to go” means.
Yes, the article “clearly” says that he installed Windows on “a” partition. However, unfortunately, that partition seems to have replaced the original partition (HFS+, with Mac OS X on it) which the user “deleted” to make room for Win XP.
And yes, I also think it’s a little silly. But it could happen, especially to someone who has never installed Windows on existing systems.
Of course, it is possible that he wiped out his OS X partition, but what makes you say so confidently that is what must have happened? Is it possible that his Mac OS X volume is no longer blessed because he chose to boot off of the Windows CD? In other words, he just needs to tell it that he wants to boot from OS X this time? In that case, he should at least TRY holding down Option when he restarts until the boot choice screen shows up. If there is no Mac OS X volume, then you’re probably right. If there IS a Mac OS X volume, he should pick it to see if it works before spending hours rebuilding Mac OS X.
I have a question that I feel will only get answered if I ask it on a recent blog. I was reading an blog posted in 2005 (“Flash Based Laptops, Sooner Than You Think” by James R. Stoup Sep 16, 2005) and I was wondering if any of it is still accurate. In particular, do you still think:
“Flash memory will NOT replace hard drives in computers. Flash memory only has a life of a couple million write cycles. While this is plenty for an MP3 player or digital camera which doesn’t access flash memory constantly, flash ram as a hard drive replacement would die a quick and painful death and your laptop would be a very expensive paperweight in under 6 months. Even if you moved the swap partition into regular RAM, the flash drive would still rack up reads and writes quickly enough that it would hit its failure limit in a little over a year. How would you like to turn on your 1 year old Powerbook only to find that it not only doesn’t boot, but all your data has died a painful and unrecoverable death?
So… don’t expect hard drives to go away anytime soon. Does that mean we’ll never see a lower power solid state replacement for the hard drive? No… it will happen eventually. There are a few promising technologies in development, but it will be years and years before we see them in an Apple computer (or Dell or IBM or….) “?
I am trying to decide if I should wait until Apple switches to flash RAM to get an iPod. Will that ever happen? If so, how soon do you think?
It’s a very different matter in iPods, which don’t run a desktop operating system environment, so flash memory doesn’t suffer the drawbacks, and nobody keeps mission-critical, un-backed-up data on iPods [interjection here - if Time Machine is successful, it makes moot most of James’s long quoted point there]. ie if your iPod fails you can always plug another ipod into your PC and are good to go.
Currently we have a situation where apple’s top-end DAP product, iPhone, uses flash but in doing so has a level of storage that compromises it as a fitting product for a big chunk of peoples’ usage preferences.
In time as flash densities rise this probably will evaporate, but it will take at the very least a good 3 years before flash memory comes to be as cheap as current mini-HD storage as per the iPod classic, probably 5. Since that is at least long as most people would expect to use an iPod for, it would be a bit silly to recommend waiting.
But you can’t give a full answer without asking what your criteria are - what is it about flash that makes you consider waiting?
[I would also say that while flash memory is taking its time providing HD-replacement mass storage, James’s argument is not the reason why; it is simply prohibitively expensive. Consider A. flash memory products balance usage across all blocks; B. flash memory has infinite read cycles; C. a typical written-data-per-day for a well used computer is on the order of 10GB.
The total write-data possible per flash disk is approximately 1E6 * Disk Capacity, or 100,000,000GB for a 100 GB drive.
Assuming perfect load balancing this might last for [100,000,000GB total writable usage]/[10GB daily usage] = 10 million days of moderate usage, or more than 25 thousand years.
In actual fact write-cycles are better than 1E6, often 2 or 4E6, so multiply up accordingly.
Also, on the recoverability front, there is never any excuse not to back up.]
Well, because Flash RAM doesn’t have any moving parts (as opposed to a hardrive), there is more that can go wrong with it. For example, it would be more likely to break if dropped. But that is just what my friend told me; he knows a LOT more about it than I do. A bigger draw to Flash is its energy efficiency, it would use less battery, need to be charged less, and the battery would last longer before having to be replaced. I guess that is the biggest reason for wanting Flash, because iPods only have so many charge cycles before the battery has to be replaced. I read that the battery in the iPod Classic will probably have to be replaced after about a year and a half if it is used a lot. Is that true? How long do they usually last if you use them several hours every day?
I would also say that while flash memory is taking its time providing HD-replacement mass storage, James’s argument is not the reason why; it is simply prohibitively expensive. Consider A. flash memory products balance usage across all blocks; B. flash memory has infinite read cycles;
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C. a typical written-data-per-day for a well used computer is on the order of 10GB.
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The total write-data possible per flash disk is approximately 1E6 * Disk Capacity, or 100,000,000GB for a 100 GB drive.
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