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Mac Net Journal
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White Rabbit Publishing |
I have a secret. And that secret has led to my setting a new record, for me at least. What is the record? Seven days and counting. For the first time since I started using an Apple computer to do my work, back in 1987 or so, I have had my main work machine running non-stop without a crash for more than a week!
How have I done this? Well, using OS X 10.0.3, of course, but I have made a few other sacrifices to make my uptime for this PowerBook 2000 FireWire surpass a week. Let me count the ways... It started more than a week ago, when the 20 gig Hitatchi hard drive I had purchased a little more than a month ago from Other World Computing (who has yet to help me resolve the problem...) failed. I spent a frustrating day playing with the dead drive, trying to ensure it was indeed dead. Then I resorted to putting a small 6 gig hard drive back into my laptop and reinstalled OS X. With such a small hard drive, my first and biggest compromise took place from the start. I have no room on this drive for both OS X and OS 9.1, so I bit the bullet and left all signs of OS 9.x off my machine. Contrary to popular belief among some users, it is possible to run OS X without the Classic environment anywhere on your machine. I have been living proof for this fact for the last week or so. So, what has it been like using OS X without Classic? Well, besides having a machine that is much more stable, I find that OS X runs much faster without having the Classic OS installed. This makes sense, since now my 192 megs of RAM are being used by one operating system, rather than two. As you can imagine, the downside of running OS X without Classic is that I cannot access many applications that don't yet exist under OS X. For instance, I keep my checking account information in an older version of Quicken...and Quicken doesn't yet exist for OS X. Other big-name applications that I cannot access without Classic include Photoshop, PageMaker, all of the Microsoft Office applications, Nisus Writer and many others. But I have found workable replacements for many of them. Instead of Word, I use the word processing module of Appleworks, and if I need to open a Word file sent to me by someone I can view the document with Appleworks, if the translators work, or opt to view it without formatting under either TextEdit or BBEdit - both of which are essential tools for dealing with text under OS X. As for graphics work, I seldom if ever use Photoshop anyway, so it is no sacrifice at all for me to edit the many images I view every day when creating my Weblog, The Equinox Project. I do all of my image editing and manipulation in GraphicConverter, the indespensible Swiss Army Knife of Mac graphics applications. And it runs natively under OS X, so I am set! The bulk of the rest of my computing time is spent working on the Web, where I use a combination of OmniWeb 4.0.1 and Internet Explorer for OS X. And I spend the rest of my time digging through hundreds of e-mail messages every day using the latest beta version of Eudora for OS X. To be fair and to add a dose of reality here, I have to admit that I do still use OS 9.1 and even older versions of the Mac OS on other computers in my home office. If I need to do a rare image scan or something of that sort, I sit down at one of the other computers and do the work, then rush back to my OS X machine to get the real work done. Is this full-scale move to OS X for everyone? Not at this point. There are too many applications that people cannot live without that still only function under Classic, and not everyone has extra machines sitting around the house. But eventually, everyone will be able to make the same switch I have, and when it happens, we are all in for a better experience with OS X. Rob McNair-Huff is a long-time Mac user and publisher of Mac Net Journal. His home office includes a history of Mac computing, ranging from an old Mac Plus to the pair of Pismo PowerBooks he and his wife Natalie use to do their work as White Rabbit Publishing.
© Copyright 2001 Rob McNair-Huff, rmcnair-huff@qwest.net.
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