I received this email today from Apple: Dear Apple Customer: Apple has determined that certain lithium-ion rechargeable batteries containing cells manufactured by Sony Corporation of Japan pose a safety risk that may result in overheating. The affected batteries were sold worldwide, in systems and separately, from October 2003 through August 2006 for use with the following computers: 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4, 15-inch PowerBook G4.
Apple is voluntarily recalling the affected batteries and has initiated a worldwide exchange program to provide you with a new replacement battery, free of charge.
I just received my new Griffin FireWave. I picked it up on Amazon for $60. It’s a pretty easy setup. After installing the included software from the CD, you simply plug in the firewire cable and then plug the surround speakers into the little shiny white peripheral. Voila…surround sound. All in all, the sound quality is pretty good. The included software has some very basic settings. There are three “modes” which include Music, Movie and Emulation (as shown).
I have had an HP Scanjet 4670 scanner since they first came out. It is one of those vertical see-through scanners. It works great. You can lay it on a book or use it vertically. It takes up minimal desk space. But the most impressive thing about it, is that it just works well with the Mac. HP provides some pretty useful software called “HP Image Zone.” It is composed of several smaller applications that handle fax, scan, photocopy, etc.
My battery has steadily lost it’s will to power my 17" Powerbook. Granted, it is 2.5 years old now. A month ago I decided to give Coconut Battery a try to see how much more I could squeeze out of it before I had to invest in a new one. It’s a pretty nice little app. It doesn’t have any bells and whistles, but it does what it needs to do (which, frankly, is a nice change for an application).
One of the biggest disappointments about the Mac Pro, is that it will not run Parallels. Oh you can install it and setup a VM, but if you try to RUN the VM then it just crashes. As most Mac users are aware, Apple Macs do have crashes. 90% of them are related to poor programing, not to Apple issues. This is one of them. I've contacted Parallels manufacturer, um.
I’ve noticed a potential problem with the Mac Pro. Ocassionally the CD-ROM will spin up. There’s no disk in there, but I can hear that high pitch spinning. Usually after I open a directory following a short period of inactivity. I’ve replaced the stock 250GB drive with a 500GB Seagate drive. I don’t think that should cause the CD-ROM access though. Has anyone else experienced this issue?
Technorati Tags: Hardware, Mac, Apple
The new Mac Pro RAM chips from apple arrived today. It was a piece of cake to install. Open the side panel. Pull out the lower card ( instructions are even printed on the inside of the side panel). Pop in two 512MB chips. No muss, no fuss.
Technorati Tags: Hardware, Mac
I just called the Northshore Apple store here in MA. I asked if they carried any of the new ram for the Mac Pro. I was disappointed and excited by the response. I was told not to expect any of the extra bling to be available in-store for another month. However, they will be carrying all Mac Pro peripherals as well. We’re talking video cards, Superdrives, SATA internal disks and RAM.
As I have previously mentioned, the Mac Pro is up and running. You can’t hear it, but trust me it’s there. About 2 years ago, I built a gaming rig that I decked out with AMD, Nvidia and Raptor drives. It was top o' the line when I was done. It’s still pretty speedy. But check out the photo of the machine. Can you tell I really would have rather had a Mac gaming machine?
Don’t get me wrong. The new MacPro is a great machine, but 1GB of RAM? Come on. In this day? So I immediately ordered another 2X512MB cards from Apple. The hard drive seems to be doing a lot of caching, and with such a silent machine, it is very obvious. Not to mention, it slows everything down. So I just received the email from Apple that the RAM has shipped. They originally said 1-3 weeks availability, and it took about 1 week.
