Restoring DVD drive

Well apple is, like android, a unix lookalike with a pretty face. The problem with Apple is you are locked into its own universe. And its expensive and support consists in paying even more money. Until your hardware is obsilote and you start spending all over again

I loathed running OS-X. When it didnt work, which was moire often than you would think, there was almost NO support on the internet.

I did like the look and feel, which is why my Linux Mint, apart from the menus being tied to the application and not randomly changing every time y6ou click on a different window, looks like OS-X.

But I have so much more flexibility. And way better support, and its more stable

Nope, just a DVD drive.

The PC with the DVD drive in it is totally silent and doesnt even have the covers on it.

Actually I have two of them... Both Midi towers, one configured as daily workstation, and the other more for entertainment / gaming rig. I have had both for well over 20 years. The cases don't change, but the content gets refreshed from time to time.

They sit in an equipment rack in the corner of the office. Both are very quiet (careful selection of components and some extra work on sound deadening panels etc). I have a pair of Optiarc DVD re-writers in one - they are very fast at ripping CD audio (< 2 mins/disc) and good as DVD rippers. The other machine has a bluray drive and an ASUS M drive. Between them they can read and write pretty much anything.

It all really depends on your needs. I use the optical drives a few times a year these days - and find having multiple drives very handy. If running a batch of CDs through Exact Audio Copy for example I will run multiple instances and do rips in parallel - so I can just keep stuffing discs.

For my personal machines I am less keen on SFF platforms. I like having a box of standard parts that I can swap in and out whatever is required.

I'd like a full desktop with low power use. Do they exist?

Only 3? Mine currently has about 14 GB. 12 GB split accross a pair of 6 GB drives and four 2 GB drives, plus two more 2 GB drives (pending use) for my satellite boxes' network storage.

All driven by a hardware Raid card, with battery backed RAM - and very effective it is too. When I was converting a test Raid 1 array to join other disks as a Raid 5 array, with the existing data on it, it did so perfectly, despite the RCD tripping the power mid conversion and it just continued when power was restored).

The heat is very welcome in the conservatory, where two of my children have their PCs and we have the dining table. During the summer, I reconfigure and instead of drawing and returning air from within the conservatory, the server draws cooler air from under the house floor and exhausts the warm air outside.

I have already cut the electricity consumption by switching to an FX8350 based home PC instead of the previous dual Xeon based rack server - I really didn't need the dual hot-swappable power supplies, hot-swappable RAM, etc. We are using a bit more gas though!

When it's obsolete, (a) many years have passed and (b) you sell it on ebay and get some money back. Which is what I've done a number of times.

When you have a problem, there's the friendly folks at uk.comp.sys.mac to ask. One of whom is Jon Bradbury who runs Bramley Computers, which does Apple repairs and upgrades. Recently I had him replace the 500GB latop drive with a

Yes, Mint doesn't look too bad, although I did today find the the 20.1 Cinnamon edition has an apparently damaged SMB implementation, so I went with Mate instead in a new VM I was putting together.

Recently, when volunteering somewhere that inevitably runs Windows, I found another reason why having the menu bar attached to the top of the screen is so much better. I needed to have an Excel window open alongside a browser window, to copy data from the latter into the former. The browser window had a menu bar, but it was only the width of the browser window, so they had to do something odd with the truncated items. Even worse on the Excel window, which had no menubar at all, and so not only did I have to do everything using the sodding ribbon, which is rubbish before you start, but on a truncated ribbon, and you had no real idea where they put the items that fell off the end. This really played havoc with my workflow.

If you have the menubar attached to the display, then it stays a fixed width, independent of how narrow you may temporarily have to make the window. So the devs can safely add more items to it, knowing they'll not need to do something arbitrary when it gets narrower.

Under macOS to add an app to the Dock I just drag it there with the mouse. Simples. Under Mint I have t make a .desktop file and then post it somewhere special. Much more clumsy.

Which Mac have you got ?. Presumably one with an intel chip, because the Arm/M1/M2 models would require a full-blown software emulator

Depends on how low... down into the few tens of watts is fairly easy.

I just measured my whole system consumption at ~100W (used whole house power meter, pulled plug on equipment rack! Looked at the difference)

At the time it was running my "productivity" PC (i7 10900, 64GB RAM, 3 x SSD, GTX 1650), two 27" screens, 5.1 speaker system, ATEN KVM switch, 2 x network switches, assorted small peripherals, and a HP laserjet in standby. I would estimate that all the non PC related bits amount to about 55W of the total load - so the PC is probably about 45W when not working that hard. That is for a fairly high end machine that is a couple of CPU generations old.

A modern 12th gen i5 could easily come in at 35W - 45W including a screen...

Not Raspberry Pi levels of consumption, but not bad compared to what we used to take as normal for lighting the room it is in.

Apple provided (as always) a full-blown emulator (Rosetta 2) so you can seamlessly run an Intel app on the M1 etc new models. They've always done that. So if I need to move to a new Mac (no sign of that being necessary yet) I can take Office 2016 with me. SWMBO has an M1 Mini as she needed a new machine a year or so ago. She's running Office 2016 on it.

It won't run the Intel-Mac version of VirtualBox, however, but ARM versions of that for the Mac are on the way. Whether thay can cope with Intel OSes remains to be seen.

No, you don't have to do that. There are at least two other ways.

I'm waiting for that before I get a Mac mini by which time they might have been upgraded to an M2.

Is Office 2016 on an M1 mac mini running under Rosetta ?

Yes.

Now don't tease, laddie, cough up. I'm actually trying to scope out what a possible replacement for macOS might look like. To the extent possible, it has to be SWMBO-proof.

Well, depends on your definition of 'low power'. I guess one thing you could do is fit an 80 Plus 'Gold' power supply, or if money is no option an

Some of the 'Gold' ones now have 10 year warranty which is handy now that Moores law seems to have lengthened the average life of a PC.

Has anyone here gone down that route (choosing a PS for its efficiency) ?

My machine at the moment, draws 46W while I'm typing (measured mains power).

I don't know if that is considered low enough or not.

That's a Zen3 5600G 65W processor, 4 sticks RAM. On a motherboard with the 5W Southbridge (motherboard without a 40mm fan).

Kill-O-Watt, mains idle 46W machine power ( 6W for 65W CPU, 12V @ 0.5A clamp-on ammeter) Prime95 138W machine power (84W for 65W CPU, 12V @ 7.0A clamp-on ammeter) Furmark 127W machine power (10W for 65W CPU, 12V @ 0.8A clamp-on ammeter) Both 202W machine power (70W for 65W CPU, 12V @ 5.8A clamp-on ammeter)

If I were to remove the hard drive and use an SSD, that would help a bit. As would pulling the 1050ti out of the machine and using the Vega7 GPU inside the CPU.

The 1050ti is only being used, as an experiment, to see if some VMs would work any better. it did not seem to make too much difference. The 1050ti is what I could get at the computer store. My computer store is a wreck now, and has gone from a well run store, to a nothing-store. (Whole sections of their web site, are completely "Sold Out", that is, if they ever had the materials in the first place.) Other stores don't seem to have nearly the problem my worn-out store has got. I keep waiting for bankruptcy and closure.

My Intel machine, by comparison, idles at 100W and peaks at 400W.

If you needed to save power:

*******

These are the AM5 ones that came out recently, but they likely don't have GPUs in them. They're 65W (meaning they zoom up towards

Paul

Go to the main menu, select the app, right click and select 'add to panel'

Nothing is proof against anything. An even more elderly friend wiped out

It took me hours to work that out after I had recreated it all.

I know that. But it doesn't appear on the main menu unless I've already created, and put into /usr/local/share/applications, a .desktop file.

Er, have you tried right clicking on the menu/edit menu, and adding it to the menu?

The point is that its not clear on where on a Mac the 'app' appears that is draggable.

All you are saying is that apps come with their own .desktop (equivalent) files in MACOS. Well, so they do in mint, in the menus.

I cant work out what apps in Mint do NOT.

Ive had only a very few nonstandard specialist compile it yourself stuff. Or apps that I have written myself.

Working on this. So far I've managed to crash the start menu and have its icon (the Lm one) vanish.

It can be anywhere you like, although for the most part people put apps in the Applications folder ( /Applications ). Then you drag it to the Dock. What's already on the Dock politely moves aside to make space for you to drop it there.

I've no idea what the euqivalent is in macOS, or where that info is stored. It may be inside the app, which on macOS is actually a folder (but that is hidden from the user when using the GUI). That's where the app's resources are stored, such as its icon.

The supplied apps will have one, I expect. For my own app, I had to make one and then figure out where to put it. Perhaps that's all done for you when running apt-get. More research required.