The View From Here: Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night

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The View From Here: Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night

March 1997

(With apologies to Dylan Thomas.)

Apple recently released the world's fastest laptop computer, the PowerBook 3400. My fourteen-month-old almost-state-of-the-art PowerBook 5300c is no longer the "King of Hill". Mortality has an ugly stench to it. So this month I'll touch on some things you can do to extend the life of your Macintosh.

RAM, RAM, RAM

There's absolutely nothing better for rejuvenating your Macintosh than adding RAM. The more memory your computer has the more programs you can run simultaneously, the faster RAM-needy programs run, and the more technologies you can add to the operating system (technologies like "Speech.png", "CyberDog.png", "QuickTime" and QuickTime Virtual Reality, "QuickDraw 3D", and a host of others.) Watching your "old" dog perform new tricks does wonders for the soul.

According to "RAM Watch" I can get a 32 megabyte RAM module for my PowerBook for less than US$200. (Compare that with the price I actually paid for my TechWorks 32 MB RAM module at the January 1996 San Francisco MacWorld Expo: US$900.) RAM for desktop machines is even cheaper. If nothing else, invest in some RAM.

Software like "Connectix"'s RAM Doubler 2 are quite good for those of us on a tight budget, but real RAM does a better job of being RAM.

Spinning Platters

I just this week replaced my PowerBook's internal factory-installed half-gig hard drive with a two gig model from Microtech. 500 MB was feeling a bit claustrophobic, what with the disk space required by the aforementioned cool technologies and monster applications like Microsoft Exchange and Schedule Plus (bloat! bloat!). Suddenly having four times the amount of disk space is almost as much fun as having more RAM.

Because two gigabyte models are arriving all over, one and 1.4 GB models are dropping in price. Please check it out. Some machines use SCSI and others use IDE versions, make sure you remember what type your Macintosh uses. You'll have to work out some method for transferring the data from the old main drive to the new one, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Having divided the new drive into two one-gig partitions, I have enough room to continue working on video (they are really big files), test up-coming versions of Macintosh operating systems (don't ask, they're getting better all the time), and still use the second partition to burn CD-ROMs.

Burn CD-ROMs

APS offers a 4X CD-ROM-burner for under US$500. Now I can make durable backups and keep archival disk images of all the software I've purchased over the years. (Those damn floppies go bad faster than popcorn goes stale. Well, maybe not quite that fast.)

Faster bits from here to there

Modems are dropping in price all the time. The widespread availablity of 33.6 kbps modems (include a free firmware upgrade for owners of "Global Village" PowerPort PCMCIA modems) means that 28.8 kbps modems are cheap, and 14.4 kbps modems are almost free. This might be the time to splurge for a faster modem than the one you've got. Go for the gusto. (56 kbps modems are arriving in starts and fits, but they're not compatible with each other. That's a column for another time.)

Sorry for the short column, but it's been a hectic week beyond belief. Perhaps that's the story I'll tell next month.

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