Paul Boutin

I finally had time to risk updating my iBook to Mac OS X over the holidays. I offer three tips, gleaned from a week of tinkering through rainy days, to anyone considering the same move.

#1 - Max Your Memory: The stuff is practically free these days, so cram your Mac with the maximum memory you can afford - 256M or more. Then set Classic mode to start up whenever you login (it’s in the System Preferences panel) so older applications like RealPlayer or MS Office (the non-X version) don’t take forever to launch. The more memory you have, the less time you’ll spend watching the little color wheel spin while your computer reads and writes from virtual memory on the hard disk.

Don’t bother making a custom swap partition, and don’t worry if you don’t know what a swap partition is. It helped earlier versions of OS X run faster. But swap speed problems seem to be fixed as of version 10.1.

#2 - Restore the Menus: Download and install FruitMenu to restore the Apple Menu on the left side of the screen to the one you’re familiar with, and ASM to restore the application switcher on the right. These are both well-written, flexible programs that won’t mess up your Mac.

FruitMenu	ASM

Doc Searls also recommends
WindowShade X from the maker of FruitMenu, to restore that particular functionality.

#3 - Get More Music: Download the OpenAG X client for Audiogalaxy, and then sign up at Audiogalaxy’s site to find and download music. Some artists and songs are blocked from the system, but people find ways to sneak them on if you search a bit harder.

There are other peer-to-peer systems for swapping files, but they’re more complicated to use and/or they don’t have OS X software that works as well as OpenAG X. You can set its Preferences to download songs right into your personal iTunes Music folder.

Bondi iMac Upgrade Trick: If you’ve got an original Bondi iMac, which I do, you’ll find that the OS X installation kit won’t let you install onto its 1998 MacOS 8.5 HFS format disk drive without wiping and reformatting the disk, even if you’ve updated to OS 9 already, for reasons too complicated to go on about here.

The workaround: Borrow a CD-ROM burner, USB keychain drive, or other plug-and-play storage device with 2 megabytes or more capacity. You may need to boot your iMac from the MacOS 9.2 disc that comes with OS X in order to recognize some of these. Then download a $30 tool called PlusMaker and copy/burn/save it to the USB device. Reboot your iMac with the MacOS 9.2 disk instead of the hard drive, and run PlusMaker from the external drive to convert your hard disk to HFS+ format, which takes about 20 minutes. After that, you can proceed with the regular OS X installation.

Thanks to Ben Finkelstein for helping me figure this out.