NOTE: This Miscellaneous Ramblings column originally appeared on MacOpinion on August 27, 1999. It is republished here by permission of the author and MacOpinion.

I've been thinking about computer depreciation again. What sparked this latest reverie was a letter from reader Jeff Trott (which appears in the mailbag section below) about how he bought a mint condition PowerBook 165 at a yard sale for $150. What a deal - so long as what you want the 'Book as a portable word processing and email machine. I have a friend who has been using a PB 165c for this sort of duty for years, and he has no intention of upgrading as long as the tough old PowerBook keeps percolating.

A customer of my son's has a PowerBook 145 that has been through two motherboards and sundry other repairs. Last year he dropped it, and some stuff (like the floppy drive) came adrift inside. This guy wouldn't give up on the old 'Book, however, and brought it to Tristan to fix. Tristan took it apart, found a thin piece of ash in the backyard scrap lumber pile, and used the wood to anchor the 145's guts to the broken plastic case. The old Mac booted up fine, and the customer left happy.

Last night my brother-in-law showed up with four old Macs in tow that he had picked up at a university yard sale for $40 (actually it was $60 Canadian, but I'll keep things in U.S. equivalents to minimize confusion). The 128k, two SEs and a IIsi would have cost a sum total of US$13,700 new, and all but the 128k still work. One of the SEs turned out to have a 68020 upgrade card in it, so who knows what that cost new! This old Mac extravaganza was in aid of getting a cheap word processing and email box organized for my niece to take to university with her next week.

Initially, an SE/30 (cost new $4,900) was purchased on eBay, but did not turn out so well. It had been used as a server and was not in great shape. There is an elusive motherboard problem that causes it to take forever to boot, and the power supply expired last week with a loud bang. The theory was that a used SE would be found to cannibalize a power supply from.

Plan B (or C, or D - I've lost track) is to use the SE with the upgrade as an alternate, since it appears to work fine, although it won't support the ethernet card from the SE/30. Another possibility is to use the IIsi, which makes reassuring booting sounds when powered up, but is still an unknown quantity because the Apple 13 inch monitor purchased with it (for $5) cannot be coaxed to work (or perhaps it's the video in the IIsi), and this PowerBook and all-in-one centric family has no other monitors handy to check it out. It seems bizarre, but by rough count I think there are 15 Macs in the house as I write this, and the only freestanding monitor among them is the IIsi's $5 jobbie! One of the disadvantages of living 50 miles from town in the depths of Wintel country is that you can't come up with things like Mac monitors for testing on short notice.

Anyway, this saga is ongoing as I submit this column, and I expect that a PowerBook will be connected to the 13 incher in order to check it out.

Getting back to the issue of depreciation, if you count the SE/30, plus the original purchase price of the questionable monitor and the 68020 upgrade card, we're talking a collection of hardware that cost some $20,000 less than 15 years ago, and now it essentially has scrap value. I suppose you could say the same of cars, stereos, TVs, or various other high-end "consumables" of similar vintage, but the hard cash figures still make me swallow hard.

The upside of this is that all these machines, if they can be made to work, are still useful machines on a limited basis, and if their usefulness is useful to you, then depreciation has worked in your favor. Indeed, I read somewhere recently that 78 percent of Macintoshes ever built are still in service. My wife still uses our old Mac Plus for word processing and email, which is pretty much the extent of her interest in computers, and the venerable Plus with its whopping 2.5 MB of RAM runs Eudora Light and MS Word 5.1 nicely.

The question occurs as to whether today's G3 PowerBooks and iMacs will be as usable when they're 10-12 years old as the ancient compact Macs are. If not, at least they were cheaper to purchase than the old SEs and IIsi.

iBook FAQ Web Page

EveryMac.com has posted an iBook FAQ page, where you can get answers to your iBook-related questions. For a limited time, you can also enter to win an ixMicro ix3D RoadRocket, an ATI RAGE Orion, or an XLR8 MACh Carrier G3 400 in EveryMac.com's Third Anniversary Contest. Entry is free.

Use Your Newton or Palm PDA as a Handwriting Recognition Engine for Your Mac

Foundation Systems has announced WriteHere Suite 1.0, a suite of applications for Mac OS, Palm OS, and Newton OS computers that allows you to use your handheld PDA as a handwriting recognition engine for your desktop Mac or PowerBook.

This idea certainly appeals to me as a potential way to give my hands a break from typing, since writing with a pen or pencil doesn't seem to aggravate my peripheral neuritis nearly as much as typing does. In fact, hearing about this software has me looking for a deal on a used Newton or Palm.

By connecting the PDA to the computer's serial port and launching the WriteHere Server software, you get handwriting recognition in all of your applications. You can also use your send command-keys or use your handheld as a game controller. The WriteHere Server application runs in the background on your Mac and listens for input from your Palm organizer or Newton.

WriteHere features include:

• Handwriting Recognition on the desktop. Use you handheld computer as a HWR engine for your desktop applications.
• Control your computer. Send keyboard commands from your handheld to the desktop.
• Gaming. Use your handheld computer as a game controller for your desktop.
• Convenience. Bring the convenience and simplicity of the handheld to the desktop world.

WriteHere System Requirements:

Mac OS

• Mac OS 7.x or higher
• AppleScript Support.
• Serial port or USB port with serial adapter.
• 2 Megabytes (MB) of memory

Palm OS

• Palm OS 2.0 or greater.
• 14 KB of storage space.

Newton OS

• Newton OS 2.0 or greater.
• 70 KB of storage space.

WriteHere Suite 1.0 is available now for Mac OS, Palm OS, and Newton OS users, priced at $19.95. Registered users of previous versions of WriteHere for Newton OS can upgrade for free. A Windows version of WriteHere Server is currently under development.

Free Word Processors

As promised back in July, Corel Corporation last week posted the WordPerfect 3.5 Enhancement Pack for Mac on their website as a free download.

Despite some "minor incompatibilities" with the latest release of the Mac OS (8.6), Corel believes that WordPerfect 3.5 for Macintosh continues to provide great value to the Macintosh community. Certainly one cannot argue with the value if it's free and it works. There are quite a number of reports that those incompatibilities aren't as minor as Corel suggests, but others say that WordPerfect works just fine on their Macs, even running OS 8.6. It is possible that the problems encountered are due to conflicts with third party software, which is of course an almost infinite variable.

Corel WordPerfect 3.5 Enhancement Pack for Macintosh, released in August, 1997, is the latest version of Corel's WordPerfect, the venerable word processing program that once virtually owned the DOS market, and which was first out of the blocks with a native PowerPC high-end word processor for the Mac back in 1994 when Novell owned the program. Corel has tried hard to compete with the MS Word juggernaut on the Windows side, but development of WordPerfect for the Mac under Corel's stewardship has been limited to a few minor upgrades that are basically specific bug fixes (see below). On the other hand, Corel has developed a new port of WordPerfect for Linux, and will also support the new generation Amigas with WordPerfect.

Presumably, Corel's lack of interest in continuing support of WordPerfect for the Mac can be attributed to lukewarm interest in WordPerfect from the Mac community, although there is a chicken-or-egg dynamic that obtains here.

The downloadable version of WordPerfect 3.5 is a complete product and not just a patch, update or add-on pack to a previous version, and incorporates all updates and patches issued by Corel subsequent to the original product release.

The free download consists of the WordPerfect application and utilities only. Clipart, web art, sounds, templates and some fonts that are included with the full product are included in the downloadable package. Customers who wish to purchase the full product on a CD-ROM for $25, or the boxed version with printed manuals for $175, may do so through resellers, Corel Customer Service (1-800-77-COREL), or through Corel eStor until Oct. 29 or until supplies run out.

Corel will only offer technical support for the Mac version of WordPerfect until October 29, 1999.

Corel says that "aging source code" and increasing differences in functionality between the Macintosh and Windows versions of WordPerfect have made it no longer feasible for Corel to enhance or build on the WordPerfect 3.5 Macintosh code base. Therefore, no further versions of WordPerfect for Macintosh will be released based on the 3.5 code base.

That would seem to leave the door open just a crack for a possible new WordPerfect for the Mac at some future date, but I'm personally not holding my breath.

I haven't used WordPerfect 3.5 a whole lot, but I rather liked WordPerfect 3.0 (the Novell version) which I used to use with OS 7.5 a while back. WordPerfect doesn't include all the bells and whistles that Word 98 does, but its still-impressive feature set comes in a less ponderous, bloated, and overbearing package than Word's.

The current version, WordPerfect 3.5.3, is an evolutionary refinement of version 3 and 3.1. The program's features include customizable tool bars and keyboard shortcuts; a built-in graphics editor; tables; style sheets; a macro language; full Macintosh drag and drop support; an equation editor; envelope printing; bookmarks and hyperlinks within a document or other documents; AppleScript support; WorldScript (foreign language) support; text-to-speech, an HTML editor, a grammar checker, automated tables of contents, on-the-fly spelling correction and watermarks. A "Make It Fit command" automatically reformats documents that are just a little too long to fit on the desired number of pages.

I find WordPerfect's clean interface attractive, and its easy-to-use toolbars with their plain-English labels more to my taste than Word's cryptic icons. A master tool bar allows you to select with a simple click which other toolbars you want to display.

WordPerfect 3.5's HTML editor allows you to import HTML documents from the Web and edit them, or to create your own formatted Web pages from directly within WordPerfect without fooling around with manual HTML coding. Missing in WordPerfect are integrated outlining, character styles, and the extremely useful true glossaries found in Word and Nisus Writer.

If you already have an older version of WordPerfect , and would rather not bother downloading the whole application, you can still update to the latest version 3.5.4 by downloading free patches from Corel's Website. Use the Get Info command under the File menu, with the Corel WordPerfect application icon selected, to verify which version number you currently have.

You must upgrade sequentially, For instance, if you have WordPerfect 3.5.2, you must install the 3.5.3 patch before you install the 3.5.4 updater. Fortunately, the update patches are small and quick to download. For more information on the update patches check out Corel's file info page.

Nisus Software, which unlike Corel has pledged its continued support of the Macintosh platform, is offering WordPerfect users a competitive upgrade to the latest 5.1.3 version of Nisus Writer for $59.95, including printed manuals.

You can also order the WordPerfect/Nisus Writer competitive upgrade by calling 1 800-922-2993, or faxing 619-481-7485.

And if free, slightly superannuated word processors are your cup of tea, you can download a really good version of get my personal favorite, Nisus Writer (which unlike WordPerfect has a future upgrade path), for free from Nisus Software as well. The free Nisus Writer version 4.1.6 comes complete with a registration number and the developer's blessing. Like the WordPerfect 3.5 download, this is not crippleware or nagware, but rather full-fledged, completely functional, no excuses, high-end word processor.

Of course, Nisus hopes you'll like NW 4.1.6 so much that you'll upgrade to Nisus Writer 5.1.3, and my guess is that once you're hooked on Nisus, you probably will.

However, the free Nisus Writer 4.1.6 runs happily on both 68k and PowerPC Macs, and it's speed and low memory requirements make it a natural for older machines as well as the latest ones.

in one stuffed file or five stuffed segments. Nisus emails you your registration number.

Will Conventional Desktop Computers Someday Be a Thing of the Past?

Longtime Road Warrior readers will recall my columns about the PowerBook being the "logical Mac," a very powerful computer packed into a small and portable form factor.

Jason O'Grady was singing from the same hymnbook in his MacWeek column last week.

Jason says that many people he talks to are saying that they will probably never buy another desktop computer again. Indeed, unless you have very specialized needs, or the higher price of a PowerBook compared with an equivalently powerful desktop is completely prohibitive, desktop machines make little sense anymore.

Something I would really like to know is how much of the high price of PowerBooks is really justified by the engineering and manufacturing costs associated with miniaturization and smaller production runs. My guess is that PowerBooks are probably Apple's highest-profit models.

Of course, the flat screen TFT monitors that PowerBooks require are grossly expensive at the OEM level, and if you factor in the cost of a freestanding flat-screen monitor for a desktop machine, the latter's price advantage diminishes considerably. As I have said before in this column, I have absolutely no interest in going back to a CRT monitor, even if I were to get another desktop computer again someday.

However, despite the hike in flat-screen prices earlier this year, the latest professional PowerBook G3s are priced much more aggressively than their predecessors, especially considering what you get features and performance wise. iBook is cheaper yet, although it leaves out a lot of stuff I prefer to have in a PowerBook (I know, I know, the iBook is an iBook, NOT a PowerBook).

Nevertheless, if you really don't need the connectivity and expandability of a full PowerBook, the iBook packs an incredible amount of processing power for the price, and if you refer back to my opening comments about depreciation above, I think that ultimately a simple computer covering the basics solidly is more likely to hold its value and usefulness longer than one loaded with bells and whistles that quickly become dated by even fancier bells and whistles.

O'Grady's Likes The Farallon SkyLine Wireless Card

O'Grady's PowerPage recently tested two Farallon SkyLine wireless networking cards with Nokia A020 Access Point. They report that the cards were easy to install in PowerBooks, and while significantly slower than Apple's AirPort wireless networking system, it had ample speed for everyday Internet use.

The Nokia access point worked well, PowerPage says, even from outside their building., and they rate the SkyLine card's solid design and performance as a good investment at US$299 when it begins shipping ("late August"), although as we reported last week, Outpost.com is taking pre-orders for the SkyLine Card now.

Road Warrior Mailbag

The ol' mailbag was a bit thin this week, at least partly due to a nonfunctional reply form in last week's Miscellaneous Ramblings that we were unaware of until Saturday evening. Our apologies to readers who tried to use the form. It has now been fixed. You can always reply using the email link at the top of the column.

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From Jeffrey Harris:

Dear Charles,

My PB 5300 power connector got bumped, and the internal connection got wobbly, so the battery would not charge. I emailed the Apple person who handled the 5300 standard recall repair that my 5300 went thru late last year, which included a fix of this, but was told that as it was out of warranty I would have to pay for a motherboard swap ($$). So I took the machine apart (using the excellent PDF file from Apple, available from my by e-mail on request) and extracted the motherboard. Indeed, the solder connections were broken. I took it to work (I am a physics & eng prof) and our electronics shop quickly resoldered the connection, and solidified the whole thing with a big blob of hot glue (this is standard in electronics, take a look at and old Mac Plus analog board, why didn't Apple do this?) And voilà, the thing is more solid than ever.

On the software side, I have definitively found that Outlook Express (much as I love it for desktops) is a crasher on the my 5300/greyscale/24/1 gig running sys 8.1 and Ram Doubler. So I have gone back to a multiple account configuration of Eudora Lite (latest version)-this just means multiple Eudora Folders. This works very well, indeed, seems a deal faster than Outlook.

I may be selling the 5300 to someone who needs a cheap PB for field work, we will see. I'd be sorry to see it go, but it would be nice to get something a little faster with color.

Cheers
Jeffrey Harris
(outside Canberra Australia)

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From Daniel Morris:

I have found a case [in iCab] in which dragging a link to a second window apparently passes a truncated URL. I am running the 1.6a version of the US preview on a PowerBook G3/233. My PowerBook has 96 MB of RAM, with virtual memory turned on, a 512 KB backside cache, and I'm running MacOS 8.6 on it. Follow these steps to see what I'm talking about:

1. Go to [ this URL]

2. Select "Open Link In New Window" from the contextual menu on any of the links below "Sorry, we cannot find your exact address, pick one of the following" (e.g., "3300 - 3399 IOWA ST, NEW ORLEANS").

3. Go back to the first page, and drag that link, or any of the other links to the new window you opened in step 2.

4. The result is an error from the server ("bad map request type"). Notice that the address in the URL field of the Location tool bar is a truncated version of what you tried to drag into the new window. I also observed that the URL is truncated at the same place that an ellipsis is inserted into the URL in the information bar at the bottom of the iCab window.

[ what I tried to drag]

[what appears to have been dragged]

It gets even weirder. Copying the URL from the contextual menu won't work, either.

5. Go to the first page, and copy the URL of any of the links to the clipboard using the contextual menu.

6. Select File->Open URL..., or key command-L. Select Edit->Paste, or key command-V (it doesn't work for me . . . I get the standard error beep). Clearing the URL already displayed in the dialog (by hitting the delete key), and then trying to paste shows that no part of the URL is pasted into the dialog before the error occurs.

Ciao,
Dan Morris

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From Jeff Trott:

It always amazes me, but the prices on used Mac equipment are outrageously high. Even when I look in the newspaper at used prices for both Wintel and Mac equipment, people want more than what it costs to buy something new it seems. I think so many people are really unrealistic about what their used equipment is worth.

I feel the same way about upgrading. The price of the cards for my 6500 to turn it into a G3 are so high, I would rather sell the machine and buy a brand new G3. I'd get a faster CD, larger hard drive, faster system bus, and on and on and on.

Luckily, I found a PB 165 at a yard sale for $150, it looks almost new and had lots of extras, (carrying case, books, software, etc.) A lot slower than my desktop system but I am only using it for Notebook purposes anyway. I intend on using this until after Christmas if I can and then I will take another look at iBook prices

Be seeing you-Jeff Trott

I think Jeff is right that many people have an unrealistic idea of what their computer is worth. Perhaps they're in denial over the astonishing rate of depreciation. See my Road Warrior column "The Value Scandal" in the Road Warrior archives, and check out this column too.

Of course, Macs have historically remained useful computers for about twice as long as PCs

I have mixed feelings about upgrading especially with the recent decline in upgrade card prices. For a 6500 you probably gave a good point, but if you need slots, an 8600 or 9500 with an upgrade is pretty compelling. In any case, an upgrade path should be an option.