Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

While there’s no easy way to account for everybody Leopard user’s crashing, Unsanity’s Application Enhancer is apparently the cause of many a BSOD turning up on a range of user’s systems during a system update to Mac OS X 10.5. If, after selecting “update,” you’re getting a perpetual blue screen, follow Apple’s instructions for booting into single-user mode to remove the offending software. If you haven’t updated yet, make sure you get rid of the software before you do: alternatively, do a fresh install and it’ll overwrite any of the conflicts you would encounter otherwise. And remember to backup, backup, and backup.

[Thanks, Dilan J.]

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

We’ve come to expect our Apple-related hacks early and user friendly these days, but we’ve still got mad respect for the folks at OSx86 Scene who’ve managed to get Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard up and running on Intel PCs on launch day — the day before if you felt like being a bit less upright about it. The hack requires a minimum of trickery on your part: just a burnable DVD, USB thumb drive and a bit of luck. Not everything’s super tested just yet, and OSx86 Scene will be expanding support and simplifying the process as time goes on, but this is sure a promising start.

[Via dailyApps, image courtesy of mac.nub]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

It’s not enough to have your Leopard questions answered, to hear all about what the new system is like, or to know that it’ll run on your nearly decade-old Mac. Now it’s time for the Mac fanboys and Apple early adopters to put the latest version of OS X to the test. We want to know, will it blend? In other words:

• Is your software still compatible?
• Do all of your peripherals still function perfectly? And system hardware?
• How’s it playing with Windows boxes on your network?
• Did you encounter any problems installing / upgrading?
• What kinds of bugs are you seeing?

Go ahead, cry into the comfy pillow that is our comments. Tell us what’s not working so that others may benefit from your knowledge. We’re all here for you. And us? Well, already we’ve had to give up a few applications that weren’t compatible (RapidoWrite and Onyx, to name a couple), and we’ve seen Time Machine crash enough to give Doc Brown an aneurysm, but how are things on your end?

P.S. -PCs, please sit this one out. The Macs are on a mission, and you already had your chance to whine with your brethren in a (relatively) fanboy-free environment.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Desktops, Features, Laptops

We’ve been poring over Leopard since getting our copy, and no doubt about it, there’s just way too much to say. The number of fixes, updates, and new features in this release is astounding. Granted, many aren’t major (and some aren’t even easily immediately noticeable), but the marquee apps like Spaces and Time Machine are instantly indispensable, while the finer details (like revamped Bluetooth and network connections preferences) leave little to be desired. Looking at Leopard’s gestalt, it’s plain to see that this by far the best version of OS X to date.

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Read on for a long list of changes, updates, additions, and impressions, and don’t forget to check out the gallery.

Continue reading All about Leopard: gallery, apps, impressions

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

If you want a blowout, a blowout is what you’ll get. Just as we did for Microsoft’s Vista, we’re serving up an unboxing of Apple’s latest operating system hours before it’s slated to go on sale. Thanks to the wonders of on-time early delivery, a certain individual managed to unbox his copy of Leopard already, and he’s got the pictures to prove it. Click on to the read link to see what’s waiting for you later today, but don’t expect anything out of the ordinary, okay?

[Thanks, Ben]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Desktops, Features, Laptops

Today we snagged our copy of Apple’s latest version of OS X, Leopard — something one or two of you may be slightly familiar with. So besides all the stuff found on the 300 features page, besides all the stuff you’ve seen in the months of public betas, what do you want to know? We’ll be here to do our best in illuminating the whole experience for you during the crucial, painful next few hours wherein you’ve nothing left to do but wait patiently for launch and ask Engadget questions about the technical minutiae. Let’s kick this thing off:

• Apple confirmed it: no backing up with Time Machine over the drives you have connected via USB to your Airport Extreme. Also, no Time Machine backups to SMB shares — AFP network shares only. Again, yes, Time Machine can back up over the network, but ONLY to AFP shares, ok?
• When plugging in a disk Time Machine does its song and dance, but what we wanted to know is whether it requires you dedicate that disk for backup use exclusively. The answer: it doesn’t, you can go on using your external drive’s free space as you please, but Time Machine will also take advantage of selected disks for backup. And no, if it’s an HFS-formatted disk you’re plugging in, it won’t ask you to format it.
• Classic support wasn’t killed for any technological reason, but because Apple felt that it was finally time to move on, and that support was no longer necessary. Sorry QuarkXPress 4 users!
• Apple’s fancy new screen sharing is VNC based, meaning you can use it to connect to any VNC-shared system, Apple or otherwise. However you can’t use the iChat screen-share with anything but other Apple machines, despite being VNC.
• Nope, there’s no YouTube in Front Row.
• Sorry, syncing notes to your iPhone won’t work either. Well, not entirely. The notes Mail.app keeps are actually just HTML email messages in a special folder, and if you use IMAP it will sync that special notes folder to your server. So in theory, if you have IMAP and you access your IMAP email through your iPhone or other device, you can view / edit those notes. But no, they don’t sync to the notes your iPhone’s native notes app keeps.
• Yeah, the R2D2 “Apple hologram effect” didn’t make the final cut, either. Help us Phil Schiller, you’re our only hope.
• The upgrade took about an hour on our 1st gen MacBook Pro (2GB RAM); expect it to eat up another ~3GB of space.
• Yeah, you can’t add drives to the dock You can still add drives and folders! It just doesn’t always work when we pull it over from Finder.
• We can confirm Leopard supports A2DP! (It’s a little buggy, but it’s definitely working.)
• More questions answered after the break.

Continue reading We’ve got Leopard, what do you want to know?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Laptops

“Pound for pound, the best value-priced notebook on the planet.” Sure, you could stop right there if you’d like, but where’s the fun in that? Laptop Mag was able to get their paws around an Asus Eee PC 701, and while you may not think a meager 900MHz Intel Celeron processor could stir up all sorts of jubilant emotions, apparently it still can. Reviewers made no bones about the machine’s lack of raw horsepower, and it did make sure to knock Asus for releasing a machine with webcam drivers “on the way,” but despite the rough edges, the wee 701 was deemed a great choice for the novice PC user or someone scouting a secondary machine. Notably, the Eee PC 701 isn’t apt to make just anyone smile, but if you’re interested in finding out if such a device would work for you, be sure and give the read link a bit of your time.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Laptops

While the OLPC Foundation is no stranger to unconventional power sources, a team working in a village near Mumbai now looks to be taking things to a whole new level, with them currently experimenting with a cow-powered generator to keep the laptops charged up. According to OLPC’s Arjun Sarwal, the makeshift rig uses a system of belts and pulleys to drive a dynamo taken from an old Fiat, with the cows (which are plentiful in the area) providing all the necessary brute force. Sarwal apparently turned to the cows after solar, wind, and water power proved to be unfeasible, and a gas-powered motor proved to be too expensive. No word if he also considered that other form of cow power.

[Photo courtesy of Arjun Sarwal]

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Double Dribble is basically a “video game by Konami — original version was an arcade game released in 1986.” ScrewAttack takes a look back at this title after the jump.

The NES version features 5-on-5 action on a horizontally scrolling court, four different teams (Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles), three levels of single-play difficulty, and four different choices of quarter lengths. Double Dribble was among the first games to feature cut-scenes, which depicted a mid-air player completing a slam-dunk, and one of the first to use speech, though in a limited quantity (such as announcing the game title and the game’s beginning jump ball)

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

We don’t proclaim to be experts in chip making or anything, but it seems like everything at Intel’s new Fab 32 production facility in Chandler, Arizona better function mighty smoothly in order to meet that November 12th street date the firm is still holding to. Yep, today marks the day that Intel starts production on its highly-anticipated Penryn at a $3 billion factory, which is being hailed as the company’s “first plant dedicated to churning out 45-nanometer microprocessors.” ‘Course, Intel’s only got six days left if it plans on being the first company to crank out the goods before ole Panasonic steals the thunder, and you can bet we’ll be waiting in tense anticipation.

[Via Reuters / Yahoo]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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