TMUPLive33 Hmm…did somebody say calamari?
Opening music was from the Calamari iPhone ad that came out today
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Tonight Steve Stanger from The MacAttack Podcast joins me to talk about mac maintenance, specifically hardware upgrades. Also Adam Christiason from the Maccast and Maccast Loop is with us the entire show.
Show Sponsors:
Links Mentioned during the show
The Mac Roundtable with Adam, Steve, Joseph and Tim
Apple Training and certifications site
RamJet Memory istallation guide
Memory Vendors Kingston, Ramjet, Crucial
Parts and upgrade vendors mcetech.com , Powermedic (for olderApple Notebooks)
I have to agree with Steve when it comes to ifixit.com. They have awesome tutorials on opening up certain Macs. I actually had to use their iMac G4 tutorial so that I could replace the hard drive of an iMac G4 here at a school that I work for that was WAY out of warranty. It was a bit of work, but I was able to replace the hard drive successfully.
And regarding the story about someone replacing the Woodcrest CPUs in the Mac Pro last year with the Clovertowns (Quad-core Xeons), it is true. The test was done at AnandTech.com on September of last year. Here is the link to the section where they upgraded from dual-core Xeons to the then-new quad-core Xeons:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6
While the upgrade worked in this scenario, that was only because the board was upwards compatible with those chips (these are Intel motherboards, so they might support a whole slew of processors). This is not always the case and one needs to REALLY do the research before performing a CPU upgrade. Even in the PC world, not all motherboards will support the newer chips even though they are pin-compatible. On some, a BIOS update will do it but others won’t.
Also on RAM, another of the reasons not to go with cheapy, no-name RAM is that Mac OS X tends to be very time-sensitive when it comes to the timing of the RAM. Any discrepancy in the timings (which is always the case with cheap components) will be seen by Mac OS X and possibly cause anomalies like kernel panics and such. I imagine it’s this timing sensitivity that makes Mac OS X perform so well when it gets more RAM.
Anyways, those are my $.02 on the subject. Thanks again for another informative podcast!
Claudio
Comment by QuadSix50 — June 4, 2007 @ 10:31 am
Thank you so much for answering my question, I appreciate it very much. I’ve been looking at the certification lists and I plan on hopefully getting the Apple certified technical coordinator as well. And my questions were answered extremely well, far more in depth than I thought, thanks again. ^^ Keep up the great work!
~Rickey
Comment by Rickey Larkin — June 4, 2007 @ 2:17 pm
Hi, you talk about cloning drives with carbon copy and such, but you can do it with Apple’s disk utility, I did upgrade my MacMini Intel Core Duo to a 500 Gigs external SATA drive (I made an external SATA connector) and I used disk utility to clone the drives, you just have to boot from your Apple boot CD and use the disk utility available from the Apple Menu on top, you select your drive, you go in the restore tab of the drive and drag one partition for the source and one partition as a destination and push Restore. Simple and at no cost !
Comment by Bookaroo — June 5, 2007 @ 8:09 pm
Very good point Bookaroo, that’s why I don’t claim to be an expert and I love that you guys offer different ways to do things. Thanks so much for taking the time to write and provide knowledge to the community .
Comment by Administrator — June 5, 2007 @ 8:48 pm
Hey guys, thanks a bunch for the great podcast. You covered upgrading a processor. You didn’t talk about upgrading a PowerMac G5 dual 1.8 processor. That is what I have and was wondering if an upgrade is possible. I searched all the provided web sites but could only find upgrades for G3 and G4s. What processor upgrades are possible and would I have a noticeable difference in speed?
Thank you Steve and Victor.
Jim
Comment by Jim Felder — June 6, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
There are no G5 processor upgrades. From what I understand Apple at the time had a lock on buying all Mac compatible G5 processors that were made. This of course blocked upgrade manufactures from getting their hands on the chips.
I’m guessing that at this point it’s probably not a lucrative enough business for upgrade manufactures to get into. It’s too bad, I’m sure there are a lot of G5 owners that I am sure would take advantage of available upgrades.
-Steve
Comment by Steve Stanger — June 7, 2007 @ 3:01 am
Thanks for all the great comments about the show!
p.s. ignore the weird wording of the last sentence of my above post. I guess I didn’t proof read well enough.
Comment by Steve Stanger — June 7, 2007 @ 3:05 am
I have to agree with Steve about the lack of G5 processor upgrades. Sad that Apple didn’t allow these to be future-proofed for those that don’t need to go Intel just yet.
Case in point, my father’s 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5 bit the dust about a month ago. We took it to the Apple Store and the Apple Geniuses there said that it was the CPU that was hosed. $800 to have it fixed. Had there been upgrades like there were with the G3 and G4 Power Macs, he would be back in business and probably with a faster CPU. But I’ve since found out that you can only purchase the exact speed that was originally with your Power Mac G5 and even if you do purchase it you have to run a calibration program that only authorized Apple resellers and Apple themselves have access to. If you don’t use the calibration software, the fans end up running on high and shorten the life of the new CPU.
Since most of his apps are all PPC-based, he’s looking to get another Power Mac G5 1.6 GHz with 3x more RAM and 2x more HD space for the same price of the replacement processor from Mac of All Trades (plus we can take the parts from the old G5 and put it in the new one). Either that, or he’ll take his chances with Rosetta on an Intel Mac at around a similar price.
Comment by QuadSix50 — June 7, 2007 @ 5:01 pm