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The Road Warrior Mailbag - Monday, August 20, 2007

Apple Certified Refurbished Products

From The Road Warrior Archive - Books, Tiger, And The Sounds of Silence

Apple Certified Refurbished Products

From Robert Morgan

Hi Charles,

I can echo your experiences with ACR. Bought a Macbook for my father from ACR this spring and it was completely indistinguishable from new. And in the last week, the kids bought one pink and one blue iPod Shuffle. Again, completely as-new, the only difference being the packaging. I'd definitely recommend Apple refurbished products to all my friends.

- Robert

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Hi Robert;

Thanks for the report.

Some friends of mine (family) recently bought two ACR MacBooks and an ACR iPod shuffle, and the same story.

As new condition and flawless performance at a substantial saving.

Charles

From The Road Warrior Archive - Books, Tiger, And The Sounds of Silence

Another thin late August mailbag this week, so here's yet another selection from The Road Warrior Archive, originally posted on JUne 14, 2005.

Just to bring things up to date on the topic, the 80 GB Toshiba hard driev in my 17" G4 PowerBook and the 100 GB Seagate drive in my latest Pismo acquisition (both 4200 RPM units) are reasonably quiet, but the silence chanp in my fleet remains the 20 GB HD in my G3 iBook, even after more than 4 1/2 years of use.

The cooling fans in the 17-incher run more than ever under OS 10.4.10, while the fans in the iBook and Pismos haven been heard from in more than two years now, since about the time this article was written.Instaling a modified processor heat sheild (Daystar part) proved the charm for the G4 upgraded Pismo. My quest for silent computing continues.

CM

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‘Books, Tiger, And The Sounds of Silence [Originally published June 14, 2005]

Silence is golden, and their relative quietness is one of the reasons I’m partial to laptop computers. I say “relative,” because there is a fairly wide sonic range in my experience.

My first laptop, a PowerBook 5300, was pretty quiet. You were certainly aware that the 500 MB hard drive was spinning, but it made a not really unpleasant sound, and never got much more noisier with age and use. The 1 GB drive in an old PowerBook 1400 we picked up three years ago that my wife uses has similar audible characteristics.

Not so the 2 gigabyte IBM hard drive in my next PowerBook - a WallStreet. It was tolerably quiet when new, but quickly deteriorated in that department, and was pretty cacophonous by the time the machine was eighteen months old. Identical PowerBooks owned by my son and nephew manifested the same phenomenon, so it doesn’t seem to have been an isolated defective drive. The drive itself continued to work fine until I replaced it with a 10 GB Toshiba, which was whisper-quiet when new, but likewise became noisy after a few months of use. That drive is still in the computer, and still going strong, but I find the racket annoying.

My Pismo PowerBook came with a 20 gigabyte hard drive, also a Toshiba, and it remained satisfyingly quiet, even less intrusive than the little hard drives in the 5300 and 1400 had been. However, in March, 2004, I replaced the 20 GB unit with a 40 GB, 5400 RPM Toshiba, which was louder than I like from the get-go, and is not improving with age.

The most silent of my personal fleet of laptops (they’re all still around) is the 20 GB IBM/Hitachi drive in my G3 iBook, which is barely audible, and hasn’t gotten any noisier in 29 months of use. It’s not quite as quiet as the 5300 was running off a RAM disk (i.e.: dead silent save for keyboard clicking), but it’s close. Even closer is the 40 GB drive (I’m guessing it’s also probably an IBM) in the two-year-old 1 GHz 12-inch PowerBook of my friend Michael.

While my ideal remains completely silent computing (perhaps plasma drives someday?), these two 12-inch ‘Books are very satisfactorily quiet, and a salute to the IBM/Hitachi engineers who have succeeded in making them so. I can’t fault the Toshiba drives for dependability, but they’re definitely noisy critters by comparison.

Happily, laptop hard drive manufacturers are evidently placing more emphasis on quietness these days. Western Digital recently announced a new WD Scorpio line of 5400 RPM hard drives which it claims to be the quietest 2.5-inch drives on the market, as well as having power consumption specifications similar to slower 4200 RPM drives, allowing longer battery life and increased overall reliability. The Scorpio’s quietness is thanks to Western Digital’s proprietary WhisperDrive technology with SoftSeek algorithms.

The WD Scorpio is available in 40, 60, and 80 GB capacities with either 2MB or 8MB buffer caches. The top of the line 80 GB Scorpio with 8 MB Cache lists for $179.99.

For more information, visit:
http://www.wdc.com/en/index.asp?Language=en

Another laptop hard drive with a reputation for quietness in the Hitachi Travelstar 80GN 4200rpm, ATA-6 hard disk drive available in capacities from 20 GB to 80 GB.

One of the quietest laptop hard drives available, the Hitachi Travelstar 80GN incorporates state-of-the-art Drive Noise Suppression System (DNSS) technology and Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motor technology for exceptional idle and operating acoustic performance

For more information, visit:
http://www.hitachigst.com/

The other laptop noisemakers are cooling fans. The PowerBooks 5300 and 1400 have no fans, so it’s not an issue with them, and really had never been one with any of my laptops until I had G4 processor installed in the Pismo. More on that in a moment. The problem with making silent computers, of course, is that the more powerful processor chips become, the hotter they tend to run, and you have to cool them somehow.

The WallStreet has a fan, but the only times it ever came on in use over the past seven years were just prior to and during the original processor chip overheating and burning out back in August, 2002. The fan has never spun up since I replaced the processor card.

I assume that the iBook, a 700 MHz G3, has a cooling fan, but it has never cut in even once in 29 months. The Pismo’s fan was also uniformly silent until the G4 upgrade, and over the first 16 months of use since then it cut in less than half a dozen times, nearly all of them during hot summer weather. It sure is loud, though. The processor upgrade vendor, Daystar, retrofitted me with a replacement copper heat sink, replacing the his most original composite one.

Unfortunately, after I installed OS X 10.4 Tiger three weeks ago, the Pismo’s fan began spinning up as much as three or four times a day, and weather really hasn’t been that warm here yet. Daystar’s Gary Dailey says he has noticed that Tiger is putting more stress on the CPUs of the older systems, and that he assumes this is due to the lack of a suitable GPU for offloading the Core Image and Core Graphics calls.

That was something I was apprehensive about before installing Tiger, and a bit discouraging, but the solution seems to have been installing Daystar’s latest version 3.4 of their XLR8 MAChSpeed Control, CPU performance software, which incorporates incorporates a variety of tools for CPU/Cache configuration, profiling, testing and compatibility. At this writing, the Pismo’s fan has been quiet for more than nearly two weeks, even in long sessions with the processor working hard, leaving only that raucous Toshiba hard drive disturbing the sounds of silence. I can’t say for sure, but it seems as if the XLR8 MAChSpeed Control optimization helps the machine run cooler.

Speaking of which, another Tiger-related audible intrusion is the Spotlight search feature’s obsessive indexing of saved content. Spotlight is cool, but it does add another element of noise creation.

If your ‘Book’s fan has been cycling more frequently than you prefer (for me that means cycling at all), then the XLR8 MAChSpeed Control might be worth trying, even if you don’t have a processor upgrade. The software supports all single CPU G3, G4 and G5 systems and upgrade cards within Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

MAChSpeed Control is sold in versions for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and combo packages, and is a relatively inexpensive utility, priced as follows:

MAChSpeed Control - OSX 3.4 $ 16.95

MAChSpeed Control - OS9 2.8 $ 9.95

MAChSpeed Control - OSX/OS9 3.4/ 2.8 $ 19.95

Include Postage Paid CD - $ 24.95

Additional information on Daystar Technology and XLR8 can be found via the Daystar website at:
http://daystartechnology.com/about/
and
http://daystartechnology.com/news/


CM


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cmoore@macopinion.com


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