Hi All,
I went round my mates today, he pointed to a big silver box with transparent handles and a picture with an Apple with a bite out of it on the side and said "I would like your help" (then locked the door). ;-(
So it was a G4 PowerPC or summat that *his* mate had bought off eBay "for music" and it had a very sick copy of 9.2 on it (mouse freezes on startup and the 'Serious error / reboot' message).
*Luckily* it was supplied with a new copy of X and he wanted a fresh install so I didn't have to try fault finding it .So (and so you can see what issues a PC noob might find) the first 'question' was which of the two drives *should* I install it on? I opened up the side (quite neat I'll admit, bit like Dell) and found the drives but wasn't sure what the 'rules' were re 'primary / secondary drive' so just shut the side and installed X on the 50G, leaving the 80G for the users data (assuming X / the Mac wouldn't care / would cope).
X went on ok, then it wanted 250M of updates, reboot, another 50M, reboot, iTunes and a couple of other bits, so far so good.
Then I noticed it had an 'extra' audio card installed (cables hanging out the back) but I couldn't see any reference to it in the audio panels or system profiler things? I opened the case again, noted it was an MAudio Audiophile summat so went to their web site, downloaded and installed the driver and then it was recognised ok (an extra control applet thing in prefs). Had I not 'noticed' there was an extra card in there was there anywhere in the std control panels that would have been showing an 'unknown device' or summat (like Device Manager in XP would have with a question mark)?
Then I download Messenger (via the software updates thing) and it appeared on the desktop as a file and opened in a file window. I clicked on the Messenger figures from that folder and it went through an installation procedure, resulting with the messenger sitting in the dock and the downloaded file and another icon (like a hdd?) still on the desktop. Why does some of this stuff not feel intuitive? With XP I download a file (and automatically get the choice to where) run it, it does it's stuff and that's it. The installer file is where I downloaded it and the app is the app (ok I know I can't easily move it afterwards etc but that not my question). [1]
I tried to move both off the desktop to a downloads folder on the second drive but it told me the hdd looking one (or something) was in use?
All I wanted was the Messenger icon on the desktop, what was I doing wrong please? I think I got it there eventually but it was all a bit hit_and_miss?
Then my mate unlocked the door and I was allowed to leave ... ;-)
All the best ..
T i m
[1] I can understand the initial file could be like a .zip and I might have to extract that somewhere to then run the installer but once that was done I could immediatly delete / move the .zip and unzipped folder?