For readers who missed it, Tuesday (2/24) Macs Only! provided the first online review of the Mac Picasso 540 3D Overdriv
For you Mac Quake speed freaks, here is a super site, the Quake for Macintosh Performance Page by Mathew Haffner!
I've been swamped by the number of new Apple store in CompUSA sightings. I'll collate and post them on the weekend. Many thanks to all of you reporting and please keep it up here!
From Mike Breeden of Accelerate Your Mac!, "I posted the 3rd installment (final one) to my massive SCSI card and Raid Software review. It compares the four most popular SCSI cards (ATTO, 2940, Initio, and Jackhammer) with both a single card/single SCSI drive and both one and two SCSI card Raid tests with 5 different Raid Packages. Atto Raid, CharisMac's Anubis Raid, Adaptec's Remus Lite, Conley's SoftRaid 2.0 and FWB's Raid ToolKit."
Microsoft Internet Explorer v4.0a is available for download.
From Dana Baggett, a note on the development of Sonnet's Crescendo 604/604e CPU upgrade cards:
"I haven't seen any reports on Sonnet's newly advertised accelerators for first generation Macs. The progression of developments in the last few months is interesting.The Sonnet December, 1997, January and February 1998 adv't in MacWorld listed the Crescendo 132 MHz 604 for the 6100 family @ $399. The March 1998 MacWorld Sonnet adv't listed the same product @ $199!
Their web site provides a software upgrade for the Crescendo to v.1.0.2 for compatibility with OS 8.1. So, we can hope that the problems I experienced with the initial roll out of v.1.0 have been resolved.
The April 1998 MacWorld adv't announces new products using the 604e chip for the 6100 family. A crescendo 604e 180-200 MHz @ $299. No mention any longer of the 132 MHz 604.
For the PowerPC 7100/8100 family, Sonnet announced in the MW April 1998 adv't a Crescendo 604e 200-233 MHz accelerator card @ $299.
A visit to the Sonnet www.sonnettech.com site indicates that the Crescendo products can be ordered only by using their 800 number. This suggests to me that they are not currently available - but I could be wrong. Other products such as an L2 cache card can be ordered on line.
My guess is that if the 6100/7100/8100 world wasn't waiting breathlessly for the G3 upgrade cards, the Sonnet products would be getting more attention. Even so, if the Sonnet products work well, they represent a price point half that of the announced G3 cards for significantly improved performance. The Sonnet adv't cites a 380% improvement in performance with a 6100. And one can continue to utilize on board L2 cache cards. The G3 upgrade uses a backside cache and bypasses the on board older L2 cache."
From Dave Ottalini:
"Washington Apple Pi (WAP) announces it is now taking orders for its first CD ROM disk containing the newest Mac OS (c) Upgrade - 8.1, along with a host of other system files, internet software, utilities and much much more.'This is a fabulous disk that contains a wealth of software for all Macintosh owners,' says WAP President Lorin Evans. 'Many hours of development time were put in by our members so that Pi Fillings would be the tremendous value it is.' Evans notes the disk costs just $10.00 ($2.00 P&H) and is available to any Mac owner. Bulk orders by Mac Vendors or other user groups are available.
Here1s what's on the disk (non bootable):
- Mac OS 8.1 update
- Mac OS 7.6.1 update
- Mac OS 7.5.3 update
- Mac System 7.5.5 update
- Mac System 7.1 updates
- Mac System 7.0 updates
- Open Transport updates
- Lots of great utilities
- Internet applications
- And more!
For more information, call the WAP office at (301)-984-0300. WAP is located at 1202 Parklawn Drive, Rockville, MD. Email to: office@wap.org.
WASHINGTON APPLE PI is one of the oldest Apple/Mac User Groups in the U-S. 1998 is our 20th year!"
A reader wrote me about another travesty. It seems that Gannett News will be replacing the thousands of PowerBooks (1400's and 500's) used by its newspapers' sales reps with Wintel laptops. When asked why, the usual lies/misinformation were provided by the Gannett corporate IT person, i.e. "everbody is using PC's and they are easier to use." Apple's marketing folks should be all over Gannett and corporations like it to prevent losing thousands of PowerBook sales over a pair of erroneous reasons like those.
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