Mac advice: s/w and other stuff

[Cleantone]

I just bought one for $469 shipped.

• PowerPC 1.42 GHz
• 1 Gig RAM
• 80 Gig hard drive
• Airport Wireless and Bluetooth installed
• Combo Drive
• 10 / 100 Base-T Ethernet interface
• 2 USB 2.0 and 1 FireWire 400 interface
• DVI Video with VGA Adapter
• 56K Modem
• OSX Tiger clean install with iLife, all current patches and updates installed.

The auctioner said he had a couple of macs and this was used for his iPod and probably had 40 hours on it. This will be a good enough upgrade for me for now. Same RAM (1gig) and double the processor. PowerPC will allow me to run 10.3.9 when I need to. The drive is probably 5400rpm and my TiBook has a 7200rpm Travelstar. I supposed I can swap them if and when I need to. Though my current one is 60 gigs and not 80.

I could make a small 10.3.9 bootable partition on this right? It will be nice to have 10.4. I find a lot of freeware that I cannot use in 10.3.9.

This may have been $100 more than I wanted to pay for it but it is not bare bones and it looks brand new. If he is not lying it pretty much is. Even if my software ran in 10.4 I am not so sure it would run on intell processors anyway. I think was was safe and decent. Now I'll have to get used to the narrower display again though...

If I get on the two film projects I plan to this year I should be able to drop a few K on a nice G5 in 2008. Untill then this should be a nice upgrade and will allow me to toos my TiBook in a pond (1000)

[harrymcq]

Congrats on your new baby! Good move on the 1.42GHz PPC, it should be able to run 10.3.9 no problem whereas even the next gen of PowerPC mini's require 10.4. (Just checked, MacTracker, great piece of freeware.) Also you're probably right in that a lot of your audio SW will not run (or run right) on Intel anyway w/o upgrades. You could buy a FW enclosure for your old TiBook drive but I have a deep-seated fear of well-used hard drives. Heck I have a fear of all hard drives because sooner or later (and generally sooner than people wish!) they crash....

[Cleantone]

Yeah. I already have a bunch of external drives. I plan to take the powerbook apart and try to fix what I think is the problem. Is that doesn't work I will definitly take the drive out and use it a bit. I cannot wait until a terrabyte drives costs like $50-100!!

[diesel]

whats the best LAME mp3 encoder with a GUI. i want to use it to rip cds.

[harrymcq]

I am a big fan of Max - http://sbooth.org/Max/ Can rip/convert a dizzying array of formats and has cdparanoia for reading true...

[ScS]

whats the best way to unzip that file, harry? i can't seem to figure out a way.

[harrymcq]

With 10.4 you should be able to double click in the finder and extract. If you're earlier I'm not sure, maybe Stuffit Expander?

[ScS]

eh...never mind...didn't realize it was mac only.