by CJ_Miller » 20 Feb 2010, 15:17
Hi all - I have been away for a couple of years, but am back at my old Mac antics.
Last week I bought what looks like the fastest PowerBook, a 1GHz Titanium. These machines appear to be finicky but this one looks quite good. It was cheapish. Only problem was that the audio out doesn't work at all. That kind of sucks because I mostly do audio and video work. I figured it wasn't too bad, since I like my quiet firewire audio interface. Then I was horrified to discover that firewire didn't work either... I actually got it running by scrubbing the logic board with 90% isopropyl alcohol and letting it dry. Still no onboard audio but now the firewire works. Going to max the RAM. I replaced the 60 GB stock drive which was noisy and very slow with a 160 GB Seagate which is silent and quite fast. When I can afford a second 1 GHz TiBook I am going to try to fix the audio on here - I suspect it's the output opamps.
My main machine for years has been my MDD G4. I bought a partial MDD, and a partial 1.42 GHz FW800 machine and combined them with the 167 MHz FW400 logic board. Has anybody used XServe CPUs in these? I have heard that they are somehow based on the MDD logic board. 1.33 GHz XServe CPUs seem to be cheaper and easier to find than the 1.42. It's got 1.75GB of RAM, GeForce Ti 4600, and Stealth serial port. It is decent in MacOS 10.4.11 but screams in 9.2.2. A few things to look out for: it is picky what version of the 9.2.2 system it uses. It needs one of the later 2002-2003 versions which were distributed with macs on the gray discs. This means it needs an OS X install first and then browse to the hidden cd folder "images", I think it's called classicbasic or some such thing. Also, these machines run damn hot. They have noisy fans which annoy, and they run hot besides. Mine averaged around 140-160 degrees Fahrenheit! It ran flawlessly for about five years, but then I put it away for a couple of months, and once I brought it out again it just kernel panics (X) or hangs (9). It broke from lack of use? Seems to have a serious bus problem now.
Consider that there is the fastest an OS 9 mac can be, and the fastest an OS 9 mac can be without needing special version of the OS and drivers. For instance, an MDD, eMac, or TiBook DVI won't run with a regular retail version of 9. It might require some fiddling and be slightly less convenient than running the next fastest, probably a Quicksilver.
Off to try to fix my MDD...
Keith Stattenfield and his team did a lot of work at OS 9 already, until Steve Jobs forced them to abandon it (and never release it) and go on with his former NeXT, ... 
The archive doesn't *seem* corrupt and the resource fork looks okay, but it definitely won't run on this machine. Do you have another one you want to try to compare against?