Current Computer Problems
Advice welcome. Due to the fact that I've always bought used computers, I usually inherent a plethora of problems, now being exceptionally the case. My clone I outline below for which I bought FWB Toolkit to update the driver with on my startup disk was unable to do so. So far I've been unable to get online. I wanted to switch to Earthlink, but after several phone calls to them, I decided I'd have to correct the driver problem, even if it meant wiping the drive clean and starting over. FWB won't help me because they only support up to system 8.1 on a clone. If I can't solve it in 8.5, I may have to buy 8.1 and try again to get FWB to help me make it's software grab the driver.
Meantime, I inherited an old Quadra 950 running 7.6.1 which had previously been installed with many old software programs and apparently inconsistent sets of extensions and control panels. So far, I'm unable to get online with it and I've gotten a message when I used Apple Hard Drive Setup that no SCSI device was found. So I couldn't use Drive Setup to initiallize the disk when I had planned to start over in 7.5.5 which I think is a very stable system for this old machine. I did notice even when booting from a disk that a little window comes up during startup listing Silverlining by LaCie so this driver could be controlling the startup disk which might cause Apple not to recognize the drive in the SCSI port.
Meantime, I'm trying out a 7500 with a 350mhz G3 upgrade running OS 9. I'm wondering if I should transfer some of the upgrades from my clone and call it good. We'll see after I test it out first. I just want to do the graphics work, and all this revamping takes huge chunks of time so I'm tired.
Web and Graphics Mac Clone Computer Station
I also installed a 64mb ram chip. Total memory listed by the About This Macintosh apple menu item is now 114,688k or about 115 megabytes. This computer has a 604e processor which I can upgrade to a G3. With the Twin Turbo accelerator using one of 3 PCI slots and the Ultra Wide hard drive on an adaptec SCSI card, this is an amazingly fast machine even without the G3 upgrade.
It's nice to have Apple desktop pictures which is a feature of system 8 and later. And I'm enjoying Sherlock searches too. I've already installed Macromedia's Dreamweaver which requires system 8 to run.
PowerComputing used a variety of third party components which I was unused to having to deal with. Unlike Apple machines, the hard drive it came with and the larger one I replaced it with were both 3rd party drives with foreign drivers. Installing mac systems on a foreign startup drive is tricky. I purchased an IBM Ultrastar 4.5 gig hard drive and added 3 tiny fans in front of it to keep it running cool.
After using Mac OS 7.5.5 awhile, I updated to Mac OS 8.5. I thought I had wiped the drive clean earlier by using Norton Utilities to initialize the drive. This way, I thought there wouldn't be a foreign driver on the IBM hard drive because Apple would replace it with it's own drivers. When I upgraded to 8.5, it still told me the driver couldn't be updated as it wasn't Apple. Wish I had known that before upgrading so I could have updated the driver first.
I had to upgrade the "firmware" for the adaptec card which slowed me down. Due to special problems with clones and not finding the answers on their website, they finally called me with an answer to why the update seemed to freeze the machine. After that scary moment, it was nice to hear that everything is OK and it did do the update successfully (so far, so good). I also updated as many other drivers and extensions as I could before upgrading to 8.5 to avoid problems. My Epson 850 hasn't printed cleanly since, even though I reinstalled the software which Epson recommended. I'll try again solving the driver problems.
The CD ROM player is also third party. Mine is a NEC for which I had to download a driver off the internet at the NEC website. It came over as a file with .sea as the ending which is a stuffed file. I unstuffed it with Unstuff It before I could install it.
Web page creation
As a designer for print on paper, learning to design for the internet is pleasure and pain. Information-wise, it is an incredibly flexible and instant way to show a variety of subjects and advertisers from a home base. Accepting the limitations of the web color palette, differences in how images and layouts look when viewed on individual's systems as wells as browers with so many variables, is a major frustration.
I'm using Dreamweaver and BBEdit for html pages. I am learning a lot about
how the code works, tables for layout, etc. Some of my pages were created with
Adobe Pagemill 2, now an old version, which I hated. The experience partly caused
me to choose Dreamweaver which is GoLive's competition (Adobe's upscale web
creation product). I tried WebPainter3 for animation but didn't find it easy
to use. Some of my images would become degraded, and it seemed to be quite inconsistent
in the way images were displayed. I'd welcome comments
by email of other users of WebPainter3 and comparable software. I'm trying
Fireworks for animations..
Doing artwork in photoshop is what I enjoy most. It's like traditional painting in that you are totally absorbed in creating the effect you want. Since I haven't had time to create a set of custom paintbrushes in photoshop, I still find myself scanning in sketches in pencil or brushed on ink in traditional media and adjusting them and correcting mistakes in photoshop.
I do have a digital tablet by what used to be Calcomp, now GTCO, which I dearly love. Wacomb is another popular brand. Mine is about the length and width of my laptop and fits into the briefcase with it for on-the-road sketching. The tablet pen uses 2 hearing aide batteries to be cordless. The greatest thing about it is that using Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator or similar software, you can vary the stroke by pressure, color, and opacity so that when you press harder, you get a darker thicker line, for example.
An added advantage of bringing sketches into the digital format is that you can colorize them and manipulate them to adjust contrast or create any variation starting from a single piece of art. I reversed charcoal, pencil, and ink sketches to white on black for a client's logo art. My figures don't look like long-legged models, but in photoshop, I can elongate them.
Email comments and questions