I haven’t posted anything new on my blog the past couple of days as I’ve been a bit busy
It’s my dad’s birthday this weekend, so needed to do a bit of shopping. He’s a very difficult person to buy presents for, but I can usually find something in the wonderful shop Borders Books – that’s the US site, as they don’t have a UK site, because they sell online through amazon
They have a couple of shops in Central London which are huge 4 or 5 floors full of books, CDs, DVDs, Magazines, Coffee Shop etc. and I always find something I want to buy there.
After about an hour wondering round on wednesday I found a good book on Italian Cinema which would do as a present, but I also found some extraordinary books in the Travel writing section, including several books written by skateboarding legend Tony Hawk which I can’t find a trace of online.
I also bought an intriguing book by Jonathan Margolis, a journalist from the Times newspaper called Mob_Log. It is a “book” showing scenes taken on the author’s camera phone, following his initial prediction when the first camera phones came out in 2002 about how they would change the world. The scenes are photos that nobody would take on a normal camera. The photos are funny, thought provoking, satirical and an insight into life. That probably gives it more credit than it’s due, but I ccouldn’t resist buying a copy at £5.99 (much cheaper than the list price).

Still in Borders book shop, I had a call from my agency to do some work at my old workplace – a different department, and pretty good pay. It’s only 3 days a week, but it should get me by until I can sort out a full time permanent job. I started there yesterday, and it’s a real mess, but I think I can handle it. It’s in the Psychology department, but with a bit of luck my interview next week should go well.

So I left Borders, and thought now was as good a time as any to get a new graphics card which I’ve been putting off for ages. Following the Stevenote on tuesday 10th January (the day before), I thought that I would be trading in my Frankenstein Mac for something newer, and the Graphics card will more than likely be the only thing I upgrade before I do so.

The previous week I’d gone into the Apple Store in Regent Street for the first time and asked around to see if anyone there could make any recommendations without much joy. They suggested Micro Anvika – a computer store that has a few branches in the area. They’re an apple dealer, but also sell PCs. They sell a lot of accessories, and I’ve bought stuff from them in the past.
Armed with a bit of info on what I was looking for – an AGP card that supports Core Image on OSX 10.4, and a preference for ATI, I thought that a Radeon 9600 would be a good card and fit the job.

Micro Anvika have two shops opposite each other, the first one I went to said they do the card but didn’t have one in stock, however, the other branch did. The assistant in the 2nd shop was very knowledgeable, and asked the right questions. He helpfully told me they had one on returns, and would get me a discount because it had been opened, but was still brand new. The customer who bought it before didn’t realise his PowerMac G5 had PCI express, so it hadn’t even been fitted to a computer. Everything looked good, £150, a good spec Radeon card, AGP, supports Core Image. I was excited, and soon I would get some better video playback performance in quicktime, take the load off my ageing processor. I got home, shut my mac down, pulled the old card out, and straight away I saw a problem… the new card would not go into the slot as it did not have an extra notch in it, even though they were both AGP. I looked at the manual, which was helpfully for the old version, the 9600 Pro Mac Edition. The one I had bought was the Radeon 9600 Pro PC & Mac Edition. Unbeknown to me, and due to lack of adequate research, ATI had seriously messed around with the specs inbetween. This card was a 4x AGP only card, unlike the previous version which was 4x/2x AGP. My AGP slot is 2x – and after much exhaustive searching, it seems that the higher spec card, the Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition is 4x/2x AGP, but Micro Anvika do not sell this one. It’s probably also more expensive.

Irritated, and having put my old graphics card back in, a GeForce 2mx with 32mb VRAM, I booted my mac up. While i was looking at the innards of my mac, I’d pulled out my extra USB ports PCI card and forgotten to put it back in, so shut the mac down again to put it in. Everything back together. Pressed the power button – nothing – PANIC!!! What had I done. I changed the mains cable – again nothing – more PANIC!!! Those who have read about how I built my mac up will know what a mess it is inside with custom wiring – anything could’ve happened. I realised pretty quickly that the power supply was not at fault as when i plugged and unplugged the power cable i was still getting a little spark which was good news, as I do not have a spare. My immediate suspect was the dodgy wiring, and that in setting everything back up i’d dislodged something. Straight away, I pulled out the dodgiest part – the logic board power extension cable which I had used initially to allow the use of an ATX power supply. Once again I tried to power my mac up, with no joy. In a moment of inspiration, I remembered that when I came back from holiday the clock had reset itself to the default January 1 1972 or whatever it is – and that in some mac models, if the clock battery fails, it will sometimes refuse to allow you to boot up. I pulled the battery out, and for no real reason put it back in, pushed the power button and it started up. A sigh of relief! I was back to where I had started, but will probably need to buy a new clock battery sometime this week.

But, I still had the problem that I had spent £150 on a graphics card that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get back to the shop that day, and decided that I would go back on Friday (today) after starting work on Thursday. So, this morning before I went back I did all my research, and even though the shop assistants were knowledgeable, I hoped that they would give me a refund. I spoke to the assistant who had sold me the card, and he seemed baffled as to why it didn’t work. I explained the problem referring to the manual which did show a card that would fit, especially after I explained several times that my mac had an AGP slot, and was a G4 as the system requirements said – it fitted everything on the box.

Here’s a site on AGP compatibility which shows the importance of the AGP key.
The important diagram is this one:

AGP 1x/2x runs at 3.3V or 1.5V and requires cards with both notches, while AGP 4x runs at 1.5V or 0.8V and only needs the one notch (the 0.8V uses the 1.5V part). AGP 8x runs at 0.8V, again requiring just the 1.5V notch
Wikipedia summarises it quite well on thei Section on AGP Compatibility
I think I am now an expert on AGP formats!

He then got his boss who initially appeared very knowledgeable wearing an Ixus t-shirt he was clearly showing off all the skills he was trained in. He was nearly onto the right track, but was convinced, like I initially believed, that AGP 2x and 4x were the same type of slot, and suggested that it was only AGP 1x that was really different. The only other Mac AGP card they did was the Radeon X800 which was much more expensive and very definitely only AGP 8x. I could tell now I was gonna get my refund as I started mentioning cards like the Nvidia FX5200 and they said they didn’t do them for macs. The assistant who I originally bought it from now blamed Apple for putting some strange connector on my motherboards that wasn’t a proper industry standard and gave me a full refund. Success! Great relief. I’m not sure if I’d just walked in and said I bought this card and it didn’t work because my board is 2x and the card only supports 4x that I would’ve got my refund.

So, my next challenge is should I look further into whether there is still a graphics card that I can buy which will fill the purpose, or concentrate on what my next computer should be, as that will come with a top spec motherboard, graphics card and everything I want. I still can’t decide what that computer should be