Pasi Koivisto
Forum Replies Created
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I’ve run carbon cloner to back it up to a FW drive prior to doing this.
It’s always good to have a backup! Especialy if you’re doing hardware stuff, good!As for upgrading to Snow Leopard, I don’t see the benefit to upgrade to Snow Leopard unless there is something you really need in it. The “big” things announced in Snow Leopard are OpenCL, Grand Central and Microsoft Exchange support. As for OpenCL and Grand Central this is something that developers need to support in code and that’s not going to happen over night and the hardware you have don’t really take advantage of that. Said that, there are a lot of fixes in Snow Leopard but I usually advice people to upgrade when the OS have come to the X.X.4 upgrade. This usually is the first really stable version of any OS X upgrade.
A) If I do this will this machine run snow leopard?
Yes. I think the MacBook can take 2 Gb. The system requirements for Snow Leopard are: 1Gb RAM, Intel CPU, 5Gb HD, DVD-romB) What are the other reasons this machine might be running slow and how do I determine this and put them right?
Usually the culprit is installed software that runs when the computer boots. A lot of menu extras is another. If the desktop is crowded that might also be a reason (OS X does live preview of what’s in the files which can take up a lot of ram). If there are a lot of dashboard widgets that’s also a place to look.So the fix is to uninstall stuff you don’t need, keep a clean desktop and don’t have more widgets than you use on a regular basis.
c) If I can successfully upgrade the RAM and load snow leopard (or not) could I reasonably expect the machine run Adobe CS3 or 4 design premium programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, in design etc without going insane?
It will run them. The screen size is not optimal tough since the UI can take up a lot of space, connecting a second monitor to the macbook will help with that. As for going insane, that would depend on the size of the images you’re going to work with. Basic web stuff should be workable./Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
I think I would move the timemachine drive to an external enclosure. That way if the computer breaks down you can take the disk to another computer without the hassle of getting it out, getting a external enclosure and then get to the other computer.
On a side note. What I am going to start to do on my own system is partition my system drive into 2 equal size partitions and have the system on that and a clone which I can use to try out updates etc. Then have my user account on a separate drive. If you right click on the user in system preferences-accounts you can tell os x to have the users home on another location. If you create your “edit” user as the first user on both installs you should be able to point to the same home folder and have your home available on both installs. And it really helps with “re-cloning” the clone back to a working configuration as all you’re cloning is the system and applications. Unless you have other users on it of course.
My 2-bits
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
For editing this is not a good idea as the edit software wants to have the drives available all the time.
An idea would be to set the computer to go to sleep after an hour? Not sure how much energy you save by spinning down the drives. I think that feature is there to save the drives but you could argue that the drives wear more from spinning up and down all the time. Something that draws a lot more power are displays. I usually set my edit computer to set the displays to sleep a half an hour after the longest show I am going to output, usually 1.5 hours. I do turn my computer off unless I need it to render over night etc.
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
You mentioned you left it alone for a few hours, could this be a sleeping drive issue? Not sure how the HDOne works but if it staggers the spinup of the drives (if they even go to sleep) could take a while.
You could try to go into System-Preferences->Energy Saver and uncheck the box that says “Put drives to sleep when possible”, running a Swedish system right now so I can’t be 100% about the wording for that.
Otherwise, the console entries looks like warnings, nothing serious, just something for the developers to look into.
The one entry that has me thinking is
com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[102] (com.apple.Dock.agent[106]) Exited abnormally: HangupThis could be a Dashboard widget. (The Dock process is connected to both the Dock and Dashbaord.) Try closing all your widgets and see if the problem persists.
If it does you could try to boot into safemode, (hole down the shift key while the computer boots) turns off a lot of stuff in the computer, and leave the computer on for a few hours and see if you can re-produce the problem. If you can I would suggest downloading the Mac OS X 10.6.2 combined update and then re-apply that.
If you can’t it’s time to look at what you have installed. Did you get the latest driver for the HDOne or did you use the one on the CD? If you took it off the CD I would suggest downloading the newest driver from the homepage. Also make sre you have the latest kona driver for your card. Make sure it’s the correct driver for the card.
And if this doesn’t help I would suggest a complete re-install again and see if this works better. And instead of using Software Update to upgrade the OS download the 10.6.2 combined update and apply that before you use Software Update to update the rest of the applications.
My 2 bits.
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
Check amazon.
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
It appears they removed that functionality after the 6.5.1 driver. Why, I don’t know, but I bet they had a good reason in doing that.
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
There’s not a workaround that I am aware off. But, on your keyboard you might have a button named “fn” pressing that at the same time as the function keys temporarily restores that functionality.
What I usually do, since I use FCP which uses those keys is that I assign new keyboard shortcuts for that. I prefer control-f1 etc.
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
First off we need to find out which computer you really have, there is no such thing as a Intel G5.
Go to the Apple Menu, choose about this mac and press the more info button. On the screen you get look for Model Name and Model Identifier and copy paste that here.
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 8×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI Radeon HD 4870, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
1. I refrain from putting sensitive information on them, for fear of losing the little buggers. Is there a reasonably secure way to safeguard my files on flash drives?
You can create an encrypted and password protected diskimage on the drive. This only works if you only use macs since the PC can’t read them.
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT15782. They come formatted for MS-DOS. I have drives which are under and over 4 gb (the limit for MS-DOS files?), and wonder whether I should reformat them to the Mac OS.
If you only use macs it makes sense to reformat it I think. But if you need to transport files between a PC and a mac it’s good to have it formated as ms-dos.
3. What about that Pentagon situation? Is there anything else I should know?
Relax, if there were something sneaky with them I bet a whole bunch of security researchers would have been sounding the horns a long time ago. What I suspect the Pentagon is worried about is people using the sticks at home and getting infected with a virus which would then be a security risk,
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 4×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI 1900XT, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave. -
If you’re a admin user of that computer you can type this in the terminal but be very careful and make sure you don’t make a typo since this command will use administrator privileges to delete everything if you’re not careful.
sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*
It will prompt you for your password.
/Pasi
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Editor, Colorist.
Mac Pro, 4×3 Ghz, 8 Gb ram, ATI 1900XT, KONA 3, Sony PVM20L4, Tangent Devices Wave.