I posted Sonnets 1.4.2 through 1.4.5 drivers on my site: Last update I asked for the 1.4.4 drivers so I could post them on my site. I got an overwhelming response and was given all the drivers from 1.4.2 through 1.4.5! Thanks everyone.

I had asked for the drivers because some people are having trouble again with the latest 1.4.5 driver needing to be placed last again instead of first as Sonnet has it defaulted to do. I figured I might as well post them all so you can try and see which is the most stable on your system. I also placed a link to them in my side bar.

Sonnet G3/400 woes and solution: Sam sent me some interesting news about an issue he had with his Sonnet G3 and how he fixed it. Thanks Sam.

[Hi there,
I just noticed that folks have been providing their fixes for the Sonnet G3/400.

Here's another angle. I bought one of the cards second hand from someone who said that he couldn't get his machine to work with it.

I then spent ~50 hours trying to keep it from crashing my machine. After running out of options (and patience) I caved in and called tech support. They were very nice and spent two hours (over 2 calls) with me on the phone at the end of which they said "okay, send it in." They then gave me an RMA # and off the card went. About 7 business days later, the replacement arrives. And just like the reports say: Install the driver, power down, install the card, power up and fly.

Ever since then, no problems, only fun. :)
Yours truly,
- Sam]

It is very possible that other users that have had nothing but trouble with their G3 upgrades also have defective cards. If you think you have one then I suggest you contact Sonnet and see if they will help as they did for Sam.

Interware (makers of Vimages G3's) out of business!: I found this on MacsOnly web site. I hope its not true as they are the only Japanese G3 vendor I know of!

[Interware Out of Business? MacNN.Com reported today that Interware, the Japanese manufacturer of CPU upgrades (originally sold in the US by Vimage), appears to have closed and filed for bankruptcy. However, MacNN incorrectly reports that their web site is down. We just checked it and it is still up and functioning. MacNN apparently posted an incorrect URL ("www.iijnet.or.jp/Interware/"). We've asked our contacts in Japan to follow up.]

It's been confirmed. I just saw another post on MacsOnly website stating that Interware has gone out of business :(

[Interware is Out of Business: We have confirmed through separate sources in Japan that Interware, a Japanese maker of CPU upgrades, has filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors as previously published. Interware's products were once sold in the US by Vimage and they included 320 and 400 MHz G3 CPU upgrades for the PowerBook 2400c, Apple's last subnotebook model. MacImports.Com's usual sources of the Interware G3's for the 2400c report that they no longer have any stock.]

To us, we'll remember them as the pioneers of L2 G3 technology. Goodbye Interware, we'll miss you!

NewerTech also closing!: I read this on Accelerate Your Macs web site.

[Confirmation on Newer Tech Closing: - (Update - I spoke to Roger Kasten, CTO of Newer Tech on the phone and he is to send a "Farewell Letter" later today for posting. ) Several readers wrote to say MacNN.com yesterday had a report that Newer Tech was closing. An industry source just called to say he had confirmation on this, saying a friend had also got the "letter" with the bad news. There are rumors now that another upgrade company may buy out Newer's products, but that's not clear at this time. I'll post any updates on this as I hear it. (Owners of their products might want to download any drivers they don't have. I could not get their OS X beta driver link to work at 1AM last night however.)]

I can't believe it! Another Mac CPU vendor out of business? Newer made probably the most compatible L2 G3 upgrades for our Macs. They will be sadly missed :( Newer also had firsts in iMac and PowerBook CPU upgrades. I hope the other companies do some heavy brainstorming for new products as just making PCI and ZIF CPU upgrades is getting pretty old. If Motorola doesn't get faster CPU's out soon, I see other CPU upgrade vendors going under :(

When installing new devices and old ones stop working always check the cables: I have had a few emails over the years from people who have installed new cards or HD's and then found out that another device such as a Keyboard or Monitor stopped working or worked erratically? In most cases just removing and reseating the old devices cable or connector fixed the problem. Just thought I would remind everyone of this :)

Sonnet Tempo card and sound issues: I found this info on MacFixIt's site. Sounds like there is a timing issue with Sonnets PCI-IDE controller card?

[Sonnet Tempo ATA/66 card linked to sound problems
A MacFixIt reader found that, after installing a Sonnet Tempo ATA/66 card for his G3-upgraded 7500, he began to have sound-related problems, especially choppy sounds during disk access. He adds: "When I pulled the card out and booted with a SCSI drive, the problem disappeared. Sonnet Support confirmed that this is a known issue and that it has to do with the way Acard designed the card ('if you move files that sound bad to a SCSI drive, they sound fine'). They said that Acard is working on a fix, but did not know when they'd get that done. [See also previous coverage on this Tempo card.]]

This might also cause iMovie to work sporadically which throws out my suggestion of trying it to install faster HD's :( Has anyone with a 6400/6500 and Sonnets Tempo card seen this problem?

SCSI PCI cards may also have sound skipping issues?: Later MacFixIt posted this message!

[Sound skipping problem may extend to SCSI cards Regarding yesterdays item on a sound skipping problem linked to a Sonnet Tempo ATA card, Seth Mattinen replies: "I experienced the same problem after installing an Initio Miles U2W SCSI card and a Cheetah 9 GB 10K RPM drive. The trouble was that audio, video, and even MP3's in various players were skipping when the drive was accessed. The solution? I had to turn the speed down on the card from 80MB/sec to 26.6MB/sec. According to Initio, this is a problem with QuickTime that was supposed to be fixed with QuickTime 3.0, but apparently not for me. I haven't tried the new QuickTime 5 Preview though. My Mac is a G3-upgraded PowerCenter Pro 240."]

According to this report, it may be more related to QT then just a hardware timing issue?

40 gig drive and iMovie, happy together!: Ralph sent me some info on his installation of a 40G ATA/100 drive solving his iMovie slow HD warnings. Thanks Ralph. He installed it on the stock 6400's stock IDE bus and not an one of the IDE-PCI cards so he is only getting a max of 16MBps. From the couple of postings above, I think sticking with the stock IDE bus for audio/video may be better anyway?

[Hi and thanks,

I moved the iMovie folder to the new drive partition and after deleting the old folder on the slower SCSI drive it now works at a steady video pace (some frame drops but MUCH smoother than before) and the best part, NO slow drive errors anymore! BTW you have to delete the old copy of iMovie to make it work from the new drive. Leaving both had the iMovie going back to the slower drive to read from with its frame drops and slow disk error every 10 seconds or so.

The ATI TV capture at normal window size (320x240) is almost steady as well. There is some picture frame strobing, but its regular and when converted to xxxx.mov file or compressed file the frame rate is steady. The sound is perfect. I have to experiment with it more, but its at least 300% better now.

So going to the 7200rpm ATA100 drive now gives me very good video capability and reason to save up for a dual USB/Firewire PCI board to try iMovie with the Sony digital 8 Handycam. There is still some life left in this old PM6500.

Now I have to decide which USB/firewire card works the best with PM6500s and iMovie, Sonnet has one now, I would trust them more than OrangeMicro. I'll have to see if they are offering any rebates or discounts.

I'll keep you posted on how the video editing goes. R.]

5500 and 6500 restore CD's requested!: George would like to know if there is anyplace that has these CD's so that he can get them? You can email him the information directly. Thanks.

Unfortunately I only have 6400 restore CD's :(

Monitor resolution reverting to default on cold boot?: I have been having an issue with my wife's 6400 with Vimages G3 where sometimes on a cold boot, the resolution of both our 17" monitor on the ATI VR card and the 15" monitor on the stock port both revert to default settings. I normally run both at 800x600 with the 15" having a 60Hz refresh and the 17" having a 72Hz refresh. Both have special color calibrations set as well.

For the past month or so the monitors occasionally revert to 640x480 at 60Hz and loose color calibration profiles and loose monitor positions (special position settings for dual monitors). I replaced the mother board battery, had trashed any pref files associated to the monitor or display. I even clean installed the OS and yet it just happened again after being fine for a week? Has anyone had this problem? The really weird thing is the monitor calibration setting for the 15" monitor disappears? I would think the file would remain and I just need to select it again but it vanishes completely requiring me to create a new one! Very odd! It is running OS 9.0.4 just so you know.

Web site on IDE-PCI card performance: I found this web site the other day that has a whole bunch of info on how well these new IDE-PCI cards really work in an older Mac. He used a 7500 with the PCI cards and an iMac for comparison. Its very informative.

According to his first chart, the IDE spec name for the 6400 would be called "Fast-ATA" which is the 16MBps bus speed version. He notes that most people use the wrong term when speaking of IDE buses with there relationship to their speed. I will have to agree since I never knew that there was anything slower then what we had and apparently there are 2 buses that are slower. EIDE and IDE. But a lot of HD vendors used the term EIDE for their 33MBps drives. I have also seen Ultra-ATA and Ultra-IDE which don't even exist? Oh well :) Read the labels!!!

On a side note. He mentions that Apples Drive Setup 1.9.2 is a universal driver so it installs both an IDE and a SCSI driver on all drives. This is good for people wanting to move their drive later on. Since the IDE-PCI cards look like SCSI devices to the Mac and of course the stock IDE bus is IDE to the Mac, you cannot just move any HD from one bus to the other without having both drivers. Normally you need to initialize the drive once moved from bus to bus. This has been a reported issue on many other Help sites. It would appear that using Apples latest Drive Setup will solve that problem.

6500 website!: Patrick just notified me that he has a 6500 website running. Thanks Patrick! There is some good info there on AVID cinema issues so if you have AVID on your 6400/6500, I suggest you go check out his site.

Sonnet L2 G3 works with OS 9.1 GM!: McKinney wrote to let me know that his 6400 with Sonnets 300Mhz G3 runs great with OS 9.1. Thanks McKinney. He also notes much improved CPU performance if you have a USB card installed.

[Just wanted to let you know I installed OS 9.1 GM on my Sonnet upgraded 6400. I have all extensions turned on and my third party extensions. One big improvement I noticed right away was the USB performance. With 9.0.4 when the USB extensions were on it hampered performance. I ran Macbench 5.0 after installing OS 9.1 and it scored 1021 on the processor compared to 846 with 9.0.4 with the same extension set. It replaces the ATI extensions too and I am running the Orion card. I have not tested for any improvements there but I will let you know.

I have the Sonnet 300mhz/1mb overclocked to 320 (it's been running overclocked for a year now with absolutely no problems and never over 50 c). Without the usb extensions the Macbench with OS 9.0.4 was 1039.

Happy Holidays
McKinney]

Upgrading ATI drivers to get latest games to work: John sent me some info on having to upgrade his ATI drivers to get Descent3 to run on his 6400. Thanks John. Its common for most games to require the latest drivers available and just because you own the latest OS does not mean you have the latest of everything! Usually games come with the newest drivers if they need them? I suspect you can just use the latest Universal driver updater on ATI's web site instead of using his method, but just in case here it is :)

[Tom,
I tried to get a recent purchase of Descent 3 (not an avid gamer) to work without success on my 6400 (Vimage 320, ATI Xclaim 3D Rage Pro 8MB) until I remembered some info from your site: Apple's Multimedia update for pci Macs. Sure enough, I extracted new ATI extensions with TomeViewer and replaced the matching older versions in my extensions folder. That, turning VM off, and running a pared-down OS 9.0.4 enabled the game to run, and run well, at that. I was prepared to mothball the game until I moved up to a G4 machine, but I don't have to, thanks to your site. Anybody else out there with my configuration might like to know about this fix, too. I suppose it could have wider application than Descent. Thanks again.
John]

12/31/2000 Update: John just sent me some more info stating that he had the latest 4.2 ATI drivers installed and Descent3 still didn't work until he installed the Apples ATI Multimedia Extensions. Thanks John.

[Yes, Tom. ATI's latest installer is version 4.2. That's what I had installed (and which I reinstalled, along with open GL, to be sure). I eventually had Descent running off a SCSI drive under OS 9.0.4 with the TomeViewer-extracted Multimedia update ATI extensions -- and when I switched to an ATA drive (OS 9.0.4) with ATI's latest universal installer version, Descent would not run. Copying the MultiMedia update extensions to the ATA drive enabled Descent to run from it, as well. Curiously, the most-often repeated advice I found for Descent problems was to increase VM, but I also needed to turn it off in order to run the game on my machine.
John]

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