Mac Forum / General / Hardware / August 2008

About disabling AGP8 pins for Powermac G4.
There is a requirement to disable pins 3 and 11 on the back of a Radeon 9x00
AGP card
to be installed in a Powermac. One of the known procedures is to remove the

My 2.66 Ghz Quad-Core Mac Pro has started shutting down randomly.  The
inside isn't dusty and I don't think it's a heat issue, then again I
don't know what the limits are.  It seems to shut down when I have a lot
of apps open or am using a lot of processing.

I have a Mac G-3 running system 8.6 which I use to run older software.  
Lightening blew me out of the water last week.
These programs are all pre-OSX.  My other computer is a MacPro running
OSX 10.4.11 and 10.5 on separate partitions.

I bought my first ever laptop.... Thinkpad R61i
has built in Bluetooth so want to get a decent BT
keyboard to use with it.
All the BT keyboards for Windows machines seem "huge"

My Quad G5 has a GeForce 7800GT graphics card, with 256 MB of VRAM.  
I'm interested in upgrading to a card that can drive a pair of cinema
displays at 2560x1600, millions of colors.  I'm thinking that with the
age of this machine, a card that can do that won't cost me an arm and ...

I have an old iBook G4 12" that needs a new power adapter and a new
battery.
I'd like to know if either of you have purchased what's to be found on
ebay?

I am interested in getting a HDTV card or equivalent for my Mac Pro. I
figure to use the Mac to record and display TV programs. I hope to learn
from this group's experience what to get.
Bill

Hi. I own a 24" IMac. I used to keep it on 24-hours a day until I began
worrying about overheating and "image persistence." I now shut it down
at night.
I also have two external firewire drives.  I have not been shutting them

I notice that this trackball has either USB, PS2 or serial connections.  
Is this related to different models or different years of manufacture?  
And how does it compare to the Logitech and Microsoft models?  Or do you
have a favorite trackball?

I'm relatively new to the Mac world so I have a few bits of old hardware
 to play with.
I have an A5 Wacom Artpad with a serial connection. Can anyone give me
any advice as to whether it can work on an iBook/tiger with a serial/USB

Trying to do a precision color calibration on a flat panel display, I
cannot get the "gray square with the oval in it" anywhere near dark
enough. I've calibrated plenty of CRTs, and I realize that there is a
basic difference between the way a CRT and an LCD work (one produces

I really love Time Machine, but of the two machines I've been running
it on, both have trashed the respective backup HDs.  Am I very
unlucky, or does Time Machine have more critical requirements on an HD
than most apps?  Of course, it runs every 15 minutes or hour, but I've

Hi all - I have two nearly identical Beige G3s, OS 9.1.  One exhibits a
very odd startup problem.  The progress bar begins moving ok, then just
before the first extension loads, it freezes.  If I restart, sometimes it
freezes again, sometimes it starts fine.  I'd say it freezes ...

Which hardware should be best for an external harddisk which has to be
useable on all mentioned OS's? Which interface (USB or firewire)? NTFS,
HFS+, FAT32 or whatever?
Thanks!

Say that I have an external firewire drive or an external hard drive
with OS X installed on it.  Say I plug that drive in and startup the Mac
- regardless of which one - lets say, any one since the eMac of late
2004.  Is there a keyboard letter that I have to hold down while