h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Castaway, I think the GNU freeware product is called WINe (WINdows emulator)...?

March Hare, many Macs are sold with an extended warranty of 3 or 5 years. That's how the dealers discourage you from shopping around for cheap parts - if they didn't sell you the parts the warranty becomes void, and you've wasted upwards of a hundred dollars of your purchase price.

I worked as IT support for a company which had both PCs and Macs a few years back. We were buying RAM upgrades for all our machines, and I phoned our local Mac Centre for pricing and technical details of the upgrade. Over a period of about two weeks, the following became clear:

* The Mac Centre charged at least five times as much per megabyte as our regular RAM suppliers did.

* They wouldn't release technical details of the RAM required, so we couldn't go elsewhere for our RAM with any degree of confidence that we were purchasing the right type.

* They made it very clear that if we *did* buy our RAM elsewhere, we could kiss our warranty goodbye, with no refunds or comeback.

So, while cheap Mac upgrades may be theoretically possible, if the machine is still under warranty you lose more in the value of warranty than you save on the components. And I still maintain that the reason people still use ten-year old Macs is the simple fact they cost so much to replace, and once they've bought Mac software (also not cheap) they're "locked in" to the ethos...

Castaway -

OK, VMWare defaults to half the RAM, thanks. But you can set it to all the RAM? Say, to run Lightwave for Win 2000 Pro under Linux.

Peet: Correct, there is a windows emulator called Wine, however thats not what I was thinking of.. I meant a hardware emulator, similar to vmware.. (Argh, whats the the thing called?) *search* ahhh.. found it -> plex86, have no idea how far it is tho.

Steve: Yes and no.. You can't steal your real machine _all_ its memory, else it'll keel over and die *g* (the underlying OS still needs some..) However if you have a heap of swap space, you can set to to about 3/4 or so.. (I had it at 80 with 140mb) It's probably better just to pack more RAM in the machine tho, doesn't cost that much these days..

C.

You still need a copy of windows to get the best from wine.

Peet, I suggest you get a new Mac dealer. For almost all its models, Apple specifically mentions RAM as one of the "user upgradeable" parts that do NOT void the warranty. Apple even links to a tool on their web site that lists the specifications for RAM upgrades for all of their models. Buying RAM directly from Apple is more expensive, as is buying RAM directly from Dell (only mentioned because I'm struggling with a RAM upgrade now - it works with either chip, but not both ).

Erm. Wine Is Not an Emulator (hence the acronym). It's an alternative implementation of the win32 API. What that means is that when software asks the operating system (Linux) to, say, open a new windows, Wine intercepts these commands and does them, in just the way Windows would do.

What that means is that it is just as fast as Windows - and in fact many things run faster (because on the whole Linux is faster anyway) - they aren't emulated, and can run without paying a penny for Windows.

d'Elephant, that was four years ago now, and that Mac centre has (thankfully) closed down since.

oh, btw, d'Elephant, your RAM problem sounds like one I've come across before. There are two classes of DIMM, buffered and unbuffered. Some older (>3 years old) motherboards were designed only with buffered DIMMs in mind, but will work with a single unbuffered DIMM. Most modern boards can use either in any combination, and almost every modern DIMM is unbuffered because that makes them a little cheaper to manufacture.

If this is your problem, the first thing to try is to ask around your friends to see if anyone has RAM of the same size they're willing to try to swap with you, in the hope that you can end up with two buffered DIMMs. Otherwise, trade the two DIMMs in for a single, larger capacity one, or replace the motherboard...

All this assumes, of course, that you're trying to fit DIMM memory to a PC... 8)

Anyone wanting info about Linux can ask over at the Linux Users' Group at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A458228

Yeah - to d'Elaphant and Peet..

A few years ago may very well have been before Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple again, and Apple was having many many problems due to bad decisions made by someone who wasn't Steve Jobs. (I think anyone would agree that Steve Jobs is good for Apple, and in many ways is good for the industry in general). Yeah, for a while they were being ..mean, for lack of a more fitting accurate word; but now you can get Apple RAM from any normal dealer. But beware, some dealers can't make good RAM to save their souls... Of course, the odd thing is, some companies will make RAM for PCs that's really bad, but they RAM they have for the Mac won't turn up any problems... (or vice-versa).. I don't know if that's a manufacturer thing, or a hardware-compatability thing...

Yeah. I know it's tough, but try not to mix up the Steve Jobs periods with the non-Steve Jobs periods of Apple History... Almost every good company has something come along that nearly destroys their reputation. Management from the early 90's to 1997 was such a time for Apple. But they're better now.

Wron, wrong, wrong. You want an Internet appliance, you want an iMac. Ten minutes after opening the box you're on the net, and it'll keep working indefinitely. I still use a Macintosh made in 1989 (as well as some newer ones, of course), but my 1995 PC is completely useless.

My macs like Kingston RAM.

Happy Macs have Kingston RAM

Remember, for RAM, get Kingston.

(end of commercial )

Your PC came with the Windows 98 virus? Oh bad luck!

JZG,YK - remember the first batch of iMacs? The ones supplied with the internet software on floppies, but no floppy drive...?

No, hadn't heard that. I'm not allowed an iMac (I blew the money on a digital radio receiver for the Volvo), so I have a beige G3, a Performa 6200 and a couple of old systems which used to be IIcis but one is now a Quadra 700 and the other is a first-generation PowerMac upgrade. I also have four PCs. Which is why I had to network my house.....

I never heard about an oversight such as that... iMacs with stuff on floppy? I'd be inclined to say there was a rumor of possible Internet stuff "on disk", or something like that (i.e. CD-ROM)... But then again, why would there be anything necessary on a disk for a new Mac? New Macs come with everything already on them. Even my old Performa came with a bootup CD and everything else already on it... and that's a '94....

The first ones to ship in the UK had a floppy disk packed with them which contained the dialup numbers for Apple's recommended ISPs in Europe... Not only didn't those machines have a floppy drive, but there was no CD rom as standard - the facia was blank, and if you wanted to install something other than over the 'net you had to buy an external CD ROM drive. Much amusement was had over this in the mainstream computer magazines of the time, while Apple tried to put a spin on the story saying that the best way to keep your machine functioning reliably was to stick with the supplied software and not install any 3rd party programs...

Which, to be fair, was probably true for more than half their target audience for that machine...

Oh, and one Apple spokesman said that you didn't need the floppy, as the same files were "available from their website"...

Oh, and hey you can boot the GUI from a floppy disk on a Performa - try that with Windoze!

I did, but it took two floppies...

My first PC was a 386sx-16 with 2MB of RAM, a mono CGA screen and a single floppy drive - no HDD. I had a pair of floppies, the first booting MS-DOS v5 with a RAMdisk of 1.44MB, and the second unpacking and launching a trimmed-down copy of Windows 3.0! The applications (such as Write and Calc) all lived on seperate floppies...