Mac Forum / General / Hardware / October 2005

Anyone know why I can't get "out of the box" USB drives to work
properly with my boss's Macs?
If I don't zero them out and create brand new Mac OS extended
partitions they either transfer data REAL slow, hang up completely. If

I have a Powermac 4400 with a Sonnet G3 processor upgrade running at
400mHz, 144 MB RAM and System 9.1.
One PCI slot is free and I want to insert a USB/Firewire "combo" card.
There are a number of these cards on offer from different manufacturers.

Suddenly out of the blue I can't burn anything on my internal CD drive.
Actually it's a  TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-R1312
  Device Type :  CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW
  Location :  Internal

I'm looking to replace my Epson CX5400 with another usb combo device
that handles color printing, copying and scanning (no fax).  The primary
requirements are reliability and ease of use via Airport Express.  It
must handle US Letter and #10 envelope printing.  If it's fast and/or

The LG external drives have a couple features I could use: USB and
Firewire, plus the ability to read DVD-RAM.
Anybody have any experience with any of these on Mac OS X (10.2, 3 or 4)?

Got two of these paperweights.  Apparently, nobody I can find
knows any way to make them work with a Mac.  The Mac detects
that they are there, but it doesn't know they can write CDs.

After having a bit of a scare with my hard drive I've finally decided to
buy a backup drive so I don't need to worry anymore. It seems like there's
a wide price gap between USB and Firewire drives (for the 250GB models I'm
looking at, on the order of $180 versus $320+), and I'm ...

I have an older G4 Powerbook with an internal 802.11b Airport card
installed.  When I bought a Linksys wireless access point that does
802.11g I found that I couldn't do WEP64 or 128 with the internal
card.  

I have a generation 4 Ipod. It fell, now it does not respond anymore,
it is completely dead. Does anyone have any experience or advice? Can
it be fixed? What is the most likely diagnosis? Could I fix it myself?
Do you have a service you reccommend?

My grandson will be entering art school before long and he wants a desktop
Mac to use there. I'm a PC user and am not familiar with Macs, and so
I need some general advice.
I'm not famliar with the various models, but which models would be

I'm looking for a way to connect a VGA monitor to an old Mac Quadra 840AV,
I've built a cable using the pin layout at
home.pacific.net.hk/~johnb/mtv.html, but after connecting it to the Mac I'm
just getting a dead monitor, any ideas? Am I using the wrong cable layout?

I've been wanting to get a Powerbook for some time, but with the
announcement of the upcoming Intel powered Macs "some time in the
future, possible early 2006" according to some rumors I'm unsure
if I should go for the current Powerbook, or wait?

I have tried to plug two sets of earphones into the jack on my 12"
PowerBook, but they do not fit.  It seems that the plugs are too long
and won't fully insert into the receptacle, giving me sound in only one
ear.  Do Apple earphones have a non-standard size plug?

The title says it.....
I have one administrator account and five user accounts. All of my fonts are
in one of two places
     /System/Library/Fonts

Now I need to buy some extra ram for my new G5 (2.3 ghz). I'm planning
on two gigs, one gig sticks.
I've used RamJet in the past, and always very happy. My only complaint
is that they're in my state, so I get hit with sales tax.