Drivers, drivers, drivers

Good lesson learned. We finally got everything back up and running after a bit of hand wringing and suppressing our desire to go back to Panther. I have to say that the Apple rep was excellent and wanted to try every conceivable option. Good thing, as he was trying to find a common denominator with our systems. In this case it turned out to be our network printer. I have been meaning to write a review on the Brother 5540 network printer and have not gotten around to it, and it would still be a hearty thumbs up! Seems the Panther drivers did not like at all like Tiger, and once we had attempted to print to the Brother, the printing subsystem just went totally away. Fortunately, Brother has posted some new drivers which totally fixed the problem.

If you have experienced this, go to the Brother support website and search for Mac OS 10.4 drivers. There are 4 downloads, and at least 3 are critical. Before installation, open your Printer Preferences, click on "Add Printer" and at the top of the screen select "Reset Printing System". This will erase everything, but you can put them back, and if you are like us, you can't print to anything anyway. Install the TWAIN driver first, then the other two. Go back and add the printers in as needed, and all should be good!

So, the lesson is that no matter how good an OS upgrade is, it also depends on the other devices hanging off the system and any non-Apple software that controls it.

Upgrading to Tiger? Not so fast!

Everything we said in the previous posts still stands, but if you are thinking of upgrading to Tiger, our advice is...WAIT. We have encountered some serious problems with the new operating system which would lead us to believe that it may not yet be as stable as reported. In particular, when attempting to print, every one of our upgraded computers is now crashing instead of printing! This applies to most applications and even occurs when attempting to print a .pdf file.

Hopefully this is something random, although 3 out of our 4 computers are now upgraded, and we are experiencing identical issues on each. Furthermore, one of these was a completely clean install, while the other two were over previous versions of Panther. So, there is some problem.

We are working with Apple to see if anyone can come up with suggestions, and we will keep you posted on what happens.

Our Apple Mac Experience

When we started this forum it was never intended as a place to showcase Apple, although you may not believe it based on previous posts. Not long after getting the site going, we began a major transition to the Mac, and in fact, we've been thrilled. OK, I've been thrilled...Arlene has some reservations. But then I am the technogeek here, so one might expect things to go that way. Read the full review on our new ITapestry Reviews site.

New Powerbooks make room for savings

Apple recently announced some improvements to the PowerBook line, in some cases even including more features for the same money! The primary change was a speed boost to 1.5GHz or 1.67GHz, depending on the model. (Sorry, no G5 yet!) Some models have also gained more standard memory and larger drives. The 14" iBook got a speed boost as well, bringing it up to a respectable 1.33GHz.

All this new equipment in the market has created an opportunity for the bargain hunters, with some steep discounts now beginning to appear on some of the remaining prior models. The new models represent excellent value, but with deals to be had on the older 1.33GHz equipment still left in the marketplace, it pays to shop around!

While they last:
Hot Deal at JR.com: APPLE 12 inch PowerBook G4 was $1999.99 now only $1299.88 at JR.com

Is the iPod Boosting Apple's PC Market Share?

Here is an interesting article reporting the predictions of Morgan Stanley that Apple could increase it's desktop market share to as much as 5% due to the success of the iPod. How could this happen?

We've made the switch, and I have to say that there are few regrets, if any. I am still looking for a simple PDF sorting-posting program to replace PaperPort, which even with it's flaws does a great job of helping to create a paperless office. The workaround for me, hopefully temporary, was Virtual PC. And, I hope to be able to get off that within the coming months.

For us the driving factors were viruses, hackers and spyware. These things are not totally absent from the Apple world, but they are largely so. We aren't big iPod users, but one look at that product, it's success and the simple integration Apple was able to pull off was enough to tip the scale. What we've found is that the iLife series of software is easy to use and feature rich right out of the box.

Our conclusion? Yes, the iPod has turned heads in the Apple direction. And from this and other reports we see, Apple stands to gain a lot from the "fallout" effect of this product.

Computer tax in the UK?

Here's a solution...let's tax the computers! Now the UK is considering a tax on computers that could eventually replace the TV License fee. Technically, the license fee does not expire until 2017, but they are apparently keeping close watch on technology to see how things develop. Perhaps they should have been doing this a bit earlier!

I don't know about you, but we see a slight flaw in the reasoning. Supposedly this tax is being considered because of the shift in trends from off-air to on-line entertainment. However, it really isn't feasible to watch TV or do much else interesting for long on a computer that isn't connected to broadband. And with only about 6 million broadband subscribers out of a total UK population of about 58 million, that's just a bit over 10% of the households so equipped.

Yet one could guess that a much larger number of households are owners of TV sets, possibly close to 100%, so this raises a few interesting questions - the most important being the actual rate of the tax. Based on these stats, it may need to be well over £1,000 to even begin to approach current revenues! What might this do to the growth of home computing in the UK and moreover to Tony Blair's "Broadband Britain" initiative? And really, how much revenue does the BBC think it could be losing as a result of the growth of PC's?

The last question is the one which requires most consideration. There is a lot of hype about this whole issue, and the BBC would have us to believe that real harm may come to them for all those folks deciding to turn off their TV's and watch the programs over the Internet. But the more likely scenario is that due more to sociological changes, some of which are brought about by technological advances, people may simply watch less TV. In other words, habits change. The real answer is for them to keep up with those changes by creating innovative programming which people will still want to watch.

This is not brain surgery folks, it's competition. Rather than cry foul and ask the government for help, why not come up with some innovative approaches to the problem?

Yet another case of technology overtaking law...

Here we go again...another big company fighting the inevitable! For years the UK has used a licensing system to pay for TV broadcasts, supposedly instead of taking commercial content. In fact, it hasn't always worked out exactly that way, but the TV License system is much-coveted at the BBC.

Why then, did they ever decide to start putting content on streaming video so that the growing broadband base in the UK could watch? Now, they are re-thinking that position, as it seems conceivable that streaming video may not fall under the TV License laws after all.

Interesting reading from the (UK) Times...