OT: Apple Mac computers

[Steve Firth]

Well I've had a black video iPod since they came out. So far I haven't had any woman throw herself at me.

So you must also be unaturally handsome or rich.

[Steve Firth]

Christ on a bike but your reputation for talking complete and utter s**te is well deserved.

There is free software of every imaginable variety for the Mac. Including Star Office with a native Mac interface. It's called "NeoOffice" and it's much better integrated with the Mac than Star Office is with a PC.

And of course just about anything that works with Linux will work with a Mac. Even stuff that requires X11.

[John Rumm]

Ah, sorry should have been more specific - I was thinking something like an ethernet router with mobile broadband on it. This would be for a desktop application with windows boxes and very non technical users - so something not reliant on software firewalls running on the host would be handy.

Partly, but macs support industry standard busses like PCI, PCCard/PCMCIA, and USB these days, so its no longer a monoculture under the complete control of one vendor.

[The Medway Handyman]

Oh FFS. Its only you who is confused shit for brains. Everyone else can read posts and has a memory better than a goldfish.

No I didn't. I said they were on blues & two's taking a cardiac arrest patient to A&E. You misinterpreted that by saying they were on the way to a cardiac arrest, then claimed there was no reason to hurry.

I never mentioned at any time whatsoever that they could not administer drugs relevant to a cardiac arrest. An EMT can administer any drug that LAS use to treat cardiac arrest. Because of these dedicated highly trained people you are three times more likely to survive a cardiac arrest than you were in 2001.

I don't think so f****it & neither does anyone else.

Are you employed at the moment Dennis? I ask because there is a villiage near me looking for a new idiot.

[John Rumm]

That was more a compliment to macs in general being simpler for people who are non computer literate, and have little interest in them beyond getting day to day tasks done. ;-)

[John Rumm]

Well it does to an extent. If you buy a computer which is dedicated to a task (i.e. mobile phone, PDA, Satnav, DVD Player) then they confirm to that rationale.

The difficulty comes when you want a general purpose device that can be all things to all men. You then need far more in depth knowledge of the tool and how to use it in order to get jobs done. Just as in the same way that owning a set of chisels and a hand plane is no guarantee that you will be able to produce works on par with the output of Chippendale.

Part of the difficulty with a general purpose PC (PC in the true sense) is the vast bulk of the software you use is not a part of its standard configuration.

Yeah, well ignore the charm donor.

Yup, realise that - hence my comment about a mac better suiting your needs being a serious suggestion.

[Colin Wilson]

I believe the fact you're using an M$ virtual environment might have some bearing on needing unnecessary kludges to get it working.

Virtualbox does it without the "lets steer people away from alternatives" philosophy M$ build into all their software, from DOS upwards.

[Andy Hall]

Ah. Linksys WRT54G3G

There are probably others. This takes a PC card or Express34 card with adaptor. Would need to be researched for suitable card and firmware.

True, but the drivers are well defined.

[Andy Hall]

Either that or stumped up..

[John Rumm]

Yup, that looks plausible... what about the aforementioned Vodafone card?

[John Rumm]

Go to

download and run their system scanner. It will identify the type of ram you system uses.

Another good program for teasing out marginal hardware problems is Prime95. (ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v2414.exe) Running it in "Torture Test" mode will often detect problems caused by flakey hardware.

If a system passes memtest86 and can run Prime95 without error it is probably ok hardware wise.

[Stephen Howard]

Given that the OP stated his lack of technical knowledge regarding computers from the off, his comment reflects rather more on those who responded than himself.

Regards.

[Stephen Howard]

Just a thought - do you have any computer-savvy clients?

Regards,

[John Rumm]

(excuse the dodgy OCR screen grab, but I was not typing that all in again!)

Mcrosoft. .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1 Mcrosoft .NET Framework 1.1 Microsoft .NET Framework l.l Hotfu (KB928366) Mcrosoft .NET Framewcrk 2.0 Service Pack 1 Mcrosoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1

.Net is a bunch of pre-written bits of software that sits in a library waiting to be used by any application written using .net calls. Hence if you install any bit of software that uses it, you also get copies of the runtime installed. Once microsoft update is installed, it is one of the components it will periodically check and install upgrades and fixes for. Hence the service packs etc.

Mcrosoft Compresscn Clent Pack 1.0 lor WrxJows XP

Used by the update processes to improve efficiency of patches by allowing only the differences to be collected, compressed and downloaded.

Mcrosoft FrontPage 2002

Waste of disk space some folks like to use on web sites ;-)

Mcrosoft inteiiPont 5.2 Mcrosoft IntelliType Pro 5.0

Came with your mouse and keyboard probably. Supports extra gwhizz stuff like scroll wheels, and application buttons on MS keyboards.

Mcrosoft intematcnaleed Ooman Names Mitogaton APIs

A bit of IE handles odd nonstandard characters in international domain names.

Mcrosoft National Language Suawt Downlevel APIs

Obscure library for titting about with foreign languages again. MOre here:

Offce 97, Professional Edition

Seriously buggy and unstable version of office. Office 2000 or XP is a much better bet - still crap, but likely to stay up longer than a strippers drawers.

Mcrosoft Picture Itl Photo and Prht Studio 2002

Self explanatory

Mcrosoft User-Mode Drrver Framework Featue Pack 1.0 MSN

Probably came with a bit of hardware - sounds like its device driver was written in a slightly unusual way using this library.

MSXML 4.0 SP2 03925672) MSXM. 4.0 SP2 03927978) MSXM. 4.0 SP2 03936181) MSXML 4.0 SP2 Parser and St* MSXML 6.0 Parser 03933579)

XML is a standardised way of representing arbitary information for exchange between applications, web site, databases and all sorts. There are a bunch of libraries that handle the reading and writing of the file formats. Hence you get this lot along with any apps that need to use XML.

My web Search (Cursor Mania) Norton 360 (Symantec Corporation) Norton Add-on Pack (Symantec Corporation) C?-QuoteFn

These you probably did install.

So in summary - you are right that you probably did not install most of it, however you are using stuff that in turn uses it. So not worth uninstalling in isolation unless you like playing hunt the broken application!

[Stephen Howard]

Blimey! No wonder the poor old machine ground to a halt. .Net and Norton 360?? That's more bloat than a ten day old beached whale, and just as well worth staying well away from.

Regards,

[Andy Hall]

If you look on Vodafone's web site at the 3G mobile networking, you will see an assortment of 3-4 USB dongles. That's for consumers. Now click the Business link on the page and you will see them.

I don't now whether you *have* to use their card to use their service. That would need to researched without recourse to phoning their help line.

[Andy Hall]

But how is the average user meant to know that?

It's quite difficult to avoid .Net being installed and it even comes in automatically if you have MS Update turned on.

While it would be foolhardy on a Windows machine not to have some condom software, the Symantec stuff has the thickest rubber and spoils the enjoyment the most without clear benefit.

[dennis]

.Net isn't a problem, it may use up disk space but unless you run a .Net program it doesn't take up working memory.

I won't comment on Norton, he can do his own work.

[dennis]

I don't know what vista was like in the first six months, I only got it when I broke the Tosh. I was going to put XP on it but Vista did everything XP did and didn't have any problems at all. There is the UAC prompt occasionally but they really do only happen every few days and only if I am updating something. I have no idea what these people that are always getting UAC prompts are doing and they never want to say if you ask them. You don't even get UAC prompts while running visual studio unless you run the installer.

[Rod]

Hope it works. It only did so for half our machines (2 out of 4). The others had silly things like 8 terabytes in 64 modules (or some such nonsense) according to it.

But when it works, it is fine.