The Ship Model Forum

Werner,

I agree with you - I'm using a 2-year old MBP & my 4+ year PB is now in my brother's hands - both have been my mainstay computers for daily business & personal use with 9,000 hour annual usage. Aside from replacing keyboards that I've worn down, both are Rev A models & been running fine without any downtime since purchase.

Chuck

Without turning this into a discussion of hardware, my Powerbook is now going on five years old and still runs fine. Some of the pearlescent paint cracked and peeled off the hinges, and has been abraded off the area right of the mousepad by my palm, but that is the extent of the problems.

My PC-based colleagues have been through 2-3 or more laptops by now.

I also have a 550 MHz G4 Mac Cube running in my study at home. It's been working fine since 2000. It supports my scanner and a printer, and I love it because it has no fans. Just convection.

What's to get damaged if its dropped... its a a MacBook Air & will simply float down to the ground.

Actually, I'm a longtime Mac user who has dropped my share of Powerbooks, iBooks & a MacBookPro. They all worked afterwards, but I have to admit that an anodized aluminum case doesn't bounce as well as polycarbonate.

Chuck

Werner wrote:Tut, tut. You sound like the last graduate student whose career I ruined.

Haha, only you can't ruin my life .... well, not as easily. I'm sure you have your ways....

When you installed it, it should come with a "Distant Guns RJW - Player's Guide PDF" pdf file on the desktop. Or look in your Programs --> Storm eagle studios --> Distant Guns --> Player's guide

So, they parachute me into this battle without a manual or anything.

I guess I'll have to poke around the directory or the website for one.

Tut, tut. You sound like the last graduate student whose career I ruined.

Your buying it, then giving it to me right? Cuz i'm pretty sure thats what you should do. Cuz like, I saw it first. Its mine. Mine I tell you! *breaks down into tears and clutches Werners leg, crying and drooling all over it*

Don't drop it

Actually, both. Of course you can shut them off - sort of - too.

When the first generation eMacs came out Jobs said why bother with an "off" switch ... they use about the same amount of power in sleep and shut down mode.

By the way, these systems were a stroke of genius from the design standpoint. The eMac G3 used exactly the same "guts" as a G3 laptop. The only difference was the display and the disk drive (which was not a notebook disk, but a regular disk).

My Mac G4 "Cube" is the same way, corresponding to the G4 Powerbook. Since it has no fans it makes no noise. It has been running continuously since 2000 and the only fault was when the hard drive wore out. So, I replaced the 20GB drive with a 120GB drive. It has 1GB of memory, which is quite enough for a Mac, and does absolutely everything I want, including play my DVDs all in a noiseless cube configuration. By the way, don't tell anyone but I'm getting myself a Macbook Air with the solid state disk for my birthday.

Of course, unlike a PC when I close it it "sleeps" rather than shuts down

I assume you mean laptop? If so, Windows laptops have the same feature - in fact, I'm using one right now that just woke up .

Timmy C wrote:Have you installed anything new that automatically runs once the computer boots up in those 5 years?

Hundreds of programs, including for example things that run in MacOS9 compatibility mode, which essentially requires a second (concurrent) boot. Apache and Samba start up, Apple File Protocol (net), Disklight, which flashes little red and green rectangles when I/O activity occurs on the net or disk, Weatherpop advance which stores radar and realtime weather info in the menu bar, bluetooth access to my phone, the entire Mac is WiFi based, It checks for updates as it boots, and then, of course, the entire disk is encrypted so only a properly authorized user can access it, and it connects to the backup share where a copy of every disk change is written.

Of course, unlike a PC when I close it it "sleeps" rather than shuts down, so on 99% of the occasions when I open it, it's already fully up, WiFi is connected and disk shares are restored. All within 1 second.

You ought to visit an Apple store and get the tour.

Have you installed anything new that automatically runs once the computer boots up in those 5 years?

My 5-year old Mac laptop is has and will always take 15 seconds to boot.

Well, it doesn't say it won't work on systems older than XP I guess it's their way of saying "We've only tested this on XP and Vista - if you use it on an older machine, we won't provide support, but if it works, great."

Re. Boot time - it's because you have too damned many crap in that systray of yours and not enough RAM. Take a look at what kind of junk starts itself up when your computer starts - they're all in that tray at the bottom right of your screen. See what you can set to not run when computer turns on. Generally the greatest culprits of this are virus scanners - on my old 512mb RAM system, it took 10-15 min for the harddrive to settle down after powering on. On my new machine with 3 GB of RAM, it takes 1 minute for ready-to-use status and 2 min for the harddrive to stop spinning - of course, since it's new, there's a lot less crap installed on it that wants to start up whenever the machine does.

BTW, it appears they lie like dogs.

Seems to run quite fine on my 2GHz P4 with W2000

My Mac starts from a cold boot in about 15 seconds. Why is it that PCs start out with a couple of minute reboot and progress slowly until they take 10-15 minutes to fully boot?

Ah, when he leaves for the day that Vista Machine is migrating into my office to be replaced on his desk by something similar, but not quite the same.

Did I mention I can be a real SOB?

But if you don't have a machine to run the demo on right now, then what are you going to use for the full version, pending a favourable review? =/


If your Vista machine does not have a decent video card, then it's not going to run any modern games with full graphics on - try lowering your game graphic settings to minimum.

In any case, Distant Guns does not require a very good video card - your Vista machine should run it fine. If you're really strapped for time access, download the demo and install it on a USB drive and run Distant Guns off of that when you have the chance to access the Vista machine. That way, you won't have to spend time downloading and installing.

My problem is it requires XP or later.

The PC associated with my work environment is still running 2000 pro (although it has a Radeon 9800, 2GB of memory and a 2GHz P4 on an Intel reference board, it is not considered Vista capable, although it runs Eve and Homeworld well. My Son gave me his Alienware laptop with XP, but it runs so over hot that a half-hour of runtime is about all the run time to expect from it before it has a heat crash.

I have access to one Vista machine, with an Asus P800E motherboard, 4GB of 4-way interleaved memory, an overclocked Prescott processor running around 4GHz, and an Asus X100, but it is not often available to me. Even this machine struggles with Rainbow Six Las Vegas. I wonder what they were thinking.

It's interesting that this Vista box is the only one that approaches an Alpha in spec and speed. Imagine what these games would be like on a machine with a terabyte of memory and, say, 512 processors.

It seems to me a huge gap still exists between 7,000 rpm ATA or SATA drives, and arrays of 15,000 U3 SCSI drives.