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The flip side of my Linux installation adventures lately has been a trip back technologically to the pre - G3 days. For the past week, I have been using my new/old UMAX S-900, which I originally purchased 11 months ago, for the first time as my production machine. 
The first six months that I owned the UMAX involved a protracted battle with boot reluctance and instability that nearly drove me to tear my hair out, but which was finally traced to a flaky Seagate 2 gigabyte hard drive that I purchased with the computer -- both items never-used leftovers. Since replacing the Seagate with a 4 gigabyte Quantum SCSI drive, the formerly cranky S-900 has been a relative rock of stability, and I have used it as a test bed for software and hardware reviews, for file backups, as a CD-burning platform (hooked to a FireWire drive), for Internet software downloads, and other dogsbody chores, but until this week, I had never actually employed it as my number one computer for production work, e-mail, and web surfing. What prompted the experiment was that I wanted to install SuSE Linux on my workhorse WallStreet PowerBook, which would involve erasing and reformatting the hard drive, and then the usual week of frustration having to rebuild and reconfigure my System and software array. My schedule is such that I am obliged to pursue such projects in dribs and drabs, so I needed a second computer to take over the day to day production tasks while I messed around with the WallStreet. I also thought it might be a good idea to determine whether my backup computer could actually function as a backup computer. The S-900 has a 200 MHz 604e Power PC processor, which was pretty hot stuff back in 1996, but it is far from cutting-edge in 2001. I wondered how it would handle the demands of my work day, especially considering the fact that I have found the 233 MHz WallStreet a tad slow in recent months. Well, the old machine has acquitted itself none too shabbily, and I have actually been pleasantly surprised that how decently it has performed. Indeed, in a few respects, notably a modem throughput, it is the equal or better than the PowerBook in real-world performance on the slow dial - up connection I'm obliged to live with here in the rural wilds of Nova Scotia, even though the UMAX has only a Global Village Platinum 33.6 kbps modem, and the PowerBook has a 56 k unit. Both machines are using Mac aRa Modem Magic modem scripts that give port connections of 115,200 bps. I suspect that the S-900's Tsunami motherboard has a more efficient pipeline to the modem than the WallStreet's does. If you're not familiar with the UMAX S-900, it was one of the more powerful Mac clone machines, roughly equivalent to the Power Mac 9500, with which it shares its motherboard design. It may have been the most expandable Mac OS computer ever, with six PCI slots, eight RAM slots, two processors slots, seven internal drive bays, to SCSI buses, and two rather noisy fans to cool the whole thing down. 
My S-900 is sort of a Frankenstein project. I bought the basic case, chassis, and floppy drive from Other World Computing for $300 in May, 2000. The S-900 comes with 16 megabytes of RAM soldered to the motherboard, to which I have added two 32 MB, two 16 MB, and one 16 MB 168 pin DIMMs, all scrounged and no two the same, for a total of 120 MB. The hard drive is the above mentioned 4 gigabyte Quantum, a pull from a Power Computing machine, and the processor is from a Power Mac 7500. The video card is a pull from Dan Knight's old UMAX J-700, and I also have MacAlly USB and FireWire PCI upgrade cards installed, as well as a pair of satellite speakers and a SCSI zip drive. The CD-ROM drive is an 8x Apple unit. One of the things I've enjoyed about using the UMAX as a production machine, is that it has a really nice sound card, and a lot more punch to the bass response than the PowerBook for listening to music while I work. However, there are also some comparative shortcomings, the biggest of which is slow scrolling, which is very frustrating after becoming accustomed to the "bam- you're there" scrolling that the G3 is capable of. I suspect that the main culprit here is the video card. I don't know the exact specs, but I think it probably only has one megabyte of VRAM. That issue could be rectified with a better video card, which I would have to have if I were to consider using this computer on a regular basis. The 200 MHz processor is faster than I expected, although it struggles when asked to multitask, and it doesn't perform nearly as well as the G3 for doing things like converting text documents to HTML and unstuffing compressed files. The biggest problem for me processor-wise with the UMAX is dictation software support. IBM ViaVoice simply refuses to install at all, but MacSpeech's iListen installed quite happily, and runs surprisingly well, considering that the 200 MHz 604e is well below iListen's official support threshold. It is of course slow, even slower than on the WallStreet, which is sluggish enough, but otherwise it seems to work fine. iListen's substantial RAM requirements are a bit problematical with only 120 megabytes of RAM, but it seems to coexist fairly happily with RAM Doubler. I had been running Mac OS 9.1 on the S-900 since last fall, but decided to downgrade to OS 9.0 for production work, as iListen is reportedly more stable under the older system version. Speaking of stability, while it hasn't exactly been a crash-fest, the UMAX is not nearly as stable as the WallStreet, which usually goes for or five days between restart. Memory corruption seems to happen more easily on the S-900. The old NEC 15-inch multiscan monitor I have on the UMAX isn't really up to much. It has fairly nice color, but text is fuzzy, and I just don't like CRTs. It will be great to get back to the LCD screen on the PowerBook. In fact; it will be great to get back to working on the PowerBook, period. I'm impressed with how satisfactory the old UMAX has proved as a substitute, but it's hard to go back once you get used to a faster computer. And of course, by current standards, even the WallStreet isn't a very fast computer anymore. This experiment has been a compelling object lesson in how much more productive one can be on a faster machine, and how all those extra seconds you spend waiting for a slower machine to perform repetitive tasks add up. My sessions writing, marking up, and posting Applelinks news stories this week have been running an hour longer than usual. However, the performance of this big old computer is impressive enough to make me contemplate upgrading the video card, adding a bit more RAM (still 3 slots open), and getting a 400 MHz or so G3 processor card that would make the dictation applications run with reasonable speed. A scan of the http://eshop.macsales.com/ Other World Computing Web site indicates that those upgrades together would cost about another three hundred dollars, for an IXMicro ix3D UltimateRez 8MB PCI video card, a Metabox JoeCARD PCI G3/400 MHz w/1024k 2:1 Cache processor upgrade card, and 40 MB more RAM. I'll bet those editions would make this old rig more than the equal of the po in performance, and reportedly these machines can be tweaked to support OS X. Then, if LCD monitor prices drop, as predicted, later this year, that issue could be dealt with as well. This option is definitely being added to my system upgrade deliberations. For more information on the UMAX S-900, visit: http://www.supermac.com/supermac/index.html http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/s900.shtml
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