Got PowerBook, but now I'm confused

Hi,

After reading and considering what you all had to say about iBooks,
I finally decided to splash out on a 15" PowerBook with SuperDrive.
Hooray! ...but also ouch!

It was the last one that the Apple Store in Regent Street had in
stock, and they said that they didn't have the ability to upgrade
the hard disc on site, so I decided to keep the standard 80 GB
drive rather than wait several more weeks. I rashly assumed that
80 GB was more than anyone could ever fill with software, and I'm
not into capturing raw video or anything like that.

Strangely, in the box were CDs for both Panther and Tiger. Once
I'd turned it on and battled through the registration process, I
realised that I was using Panther not Tiger, so I put the Tiger CD
in and ran the installer hoping to upgrade to the correct version.
Given that the Apple Store is crowded with queues of people
buying stuff, I was surprised that they would have old stock
lying around that had not been updated. Do you think it's
possible they sold me a returned machine or something?

After the upgrade, the Apple->About This Mac window claims I have
MacOSX 10.4. I have a lurking suspicion that Panther plus Tiger
is not equal to Tiger, and that there may be redundant stuff on
the disc left over from Panther. I would feel happier if I could
wipe the disc and freshly install just Tiger. Is this possible?

I notice that I can get updates over the Net automatically, but
I am reluctant to start downloading large updates while I'm still
on a 56K modem. I hope to get 2Mb/s ADSL soon, so I shall defer
major updates until then.

I also bought a MightyMouse and, although its basic functionality
seems to work fine, in order to redefine the buttons, etc, I am
supposed to install the driver that is provided on CD. When I try
this it complains that I cannot install on my hard disc because
I must have MacOSX 10.4.2. What? You mean not only did Apple not
supply the correct operating system pre-installed, but they
haven't even supplied the correct version on CD? What's going on?

What can be so complex about a mere mouse driver that requires the
support of the bleeding edge operating system? It's just a mouse.
The machine can already see and use the mouse. The only thing I
require from the driver is the ability to assign different
functions to the buttons, a task that's probably achievable with
a few lines of AppleScript if only I knew how.

The MightyMouse installer also says it needs 152 MB of disc space.
What?! That's bigger than the entire hard disc I was using only a
few years ago. It's about the same size as my complete software
collection currently on RISC OS (and I'm a power user who has a
heavy investment in large applications and a hoard of public
domain software; literally hundreds of applications). The average
mouse driver on RISC OS would be under 4K, and the front end
config application could conceivably be as big as 150K (actually
that's how big the entire system config application is). Now, I
realise that RISC OS is very much more efficient than most OSes,
but a factor of 1000 times more efficient than MacOS?! The 80 GB
drive suddenly looks too small. Surely this can't be right. Does
MightyMouse come with a huge free image library or something?
Can't I opt out of installing the image library? What's going on?

The next thing I tried was to set the hostname and local network
name so that the Mac fits into my local LAN's nomenclature.
I couldn't find a setting for hostname in preferences. Is there
one? Surely, I'm not going to have to enable the root account and
hack around in /etc just to set a hostname, am I? I also failed to
find the setting for the local domain name or network name for my
LAN, which in my case would be jtnet. Can anyone help?

--
James Taylor, London, UK PGP key: 3FBE1BF9
To protect against spam, the address in the "From:" header is not valid.
In any case, you should reply to the group so that everyone can benefit.
If you must send me a private email, use james at oakseed demon co uk.

.

Relevant Pages

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