Hog's Eye View

OPINION • SEPTEMBER 27 , 2000
Road Hog: Home Sweet Hog [Page 2 of 3]

The 32-bit architecture adds a dedicated CardBus microprocessor running at 33 MHz, which means additional computing power independent of the CPU, which is left free to do the kinds of ciphering that CPUs do best.

There's probably some kind of trickery that somebody could perform to make the slots go faster, but it still wouldn't take care of the dedicated microprocessor. That's where MCE comes in. Ship your PowerBook to them, and for $99, they take care of all that for you. They even offer some bundles with things like USB and FireWire cards, and, for 2400 owners only, a discounted deal on the G3/320 Interware Booster. You can find details on all this at MCE's Web site.

Hog's Eye View
Been itching to hook up an Apple Cinema Display to your Hog? You know you have. Sure, Apple makes them for desktop G4s, but these bad boys have Road Hog written all over them. Egregiously powerful, heart-stoppingly beautiful and priced to make the peecee weenies cry. Ugly monitors with crappy pictures? Plenty of peecee vendors will hook you up cheap. The Cinema Display is gorgeous, and, if you haven't seen one in action, you really can't imagine how beautiful its pictures are.

But thanks to a proprietary connector, you can't use these things with just any computer, not even with just any Mac. But thanks to the Margi Display-to-Go 4 MB CardBus card, you can hook one up to your Hog. The DVI interface is actually one of two available. The other is VGA, which generally bites—hey, it's a peecee standard, which just means universally interoperable biting. But the fact is that VGA out works just fine for certain kinds of video projectors, so you may want to use it in certain situations.

Latter day Hogs have VGA out, of course, but the built-in flavor is better for desktop mirroring than for true two-monitor operation of the sort that desktop Mac users have known for more than a decade.

A detour here into how annoying Windows is when it tries hardest to imitate Macs. Have you seen how lame their implementation of dual monitors is? Oh ... my ... god! You can have two monitors, all right, but dialog boxes open smack in the middle, with half on each screen! Unbelievably pathetic, even by Windows standards. And don't even think about adding three monitors. Hell, just for grins, I added five to my Mac IIci in 1991 just to see if I could, and the answer was, and is, bring 'em on, boys. It's not nice to make fun of the weak and the feeble, so I'll lay off NT ... for now.

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