[geeks] Advice on buying a new Mac

[Mike F]

John Francini wrote:
> Actually, the problem there is that some of those Hitachi drives like  
> to park their heads the moment they think they're not being used.
>   
Make sense, but under actual usage it seemed as if the drive parked the
heads at random. Predictably, after long periods of idle, the drive
would click and wake up. However, far more frequently than I could
tolerate, the drive would "click" or park after a short period of idle.
> There was a Mac utility called APM Tuner X (which I use to this day)  
> that allows me to set the threshold at which the drive will park its  
> heads.  Since my laptop never goes anywhere (it's a desktop  
> replacement), I use APM Tuner X to turn the threshold to the limit  
> (which prevents head-parking).
>   
I'll have to give that a try - looks like it might help somewhat. I'll
give it a try on my iBook (G3 600MHz), although the iBook actually
exhibits less of this behavior than the Mini.
> Unfortunately, the developer (Eiji Maekawa) seems to have abandoned  
> the program after putting out version 0.1.
>
>   
Well, considering that it only has one function, and hopefully no bugs
;-) maybe there was no reason to continue making releases.
> John