Finally getting somewhere!!

Question

Thanks to the helpful people on this forum I have accomplished the following after buying my Mac 9600 only three weeks ago:
1.5GB RAM on its way from the States at a tenth of the price in the UK,
Performed a clean install,
Upgraded it from 9.1 to 9.2.1 then to 9.2.2,
Installed, configured and got a Kingston PCI 10/100 NIC running,
Got and installed Office 2001,
Sorted out my disks with Norton Utillies,
Got it to see my router and network with several other PCs,
Installed iCab 3.0.3 and got it on the Net (using it to type this ).
After doing a clean install, I've noticed that window scrolling is very jerky and you have to wait quite a while for the screen and windows to refresh. Before it was almost instant. I think I might have lost a graphics card driver along the way (if Macs use them or are they default OS drivers?) Where would I be able to download them from?
Also what would a good PCI replacement card be? The cards that I have in at the moment are 8MB cards manufactured in 1996 and only go to 1280x1024 in thousands of colours, a 16MB + card would be perfect. Would any of the ATI branded Mac cards that litter E-Bay be any good?
Next on the list is a Sonnet 1GHz cpu card and some software to get me into DTP.
The Net has a lot of resources for PCs such as AdAware, and other utilities, are there any similar programs or websites that the hardened Mac user uses to keep their Mac up to date and free from bugs?
Thanks once again for all your help, I'm actually liking the Mac experience but my main XP machine is starting to feel lonely now..... :-D

Answer 1

"Would any of the ATI branded Mac cards that litter E-Bay be any good?"
Hello Donald,
Yes, the older ATI PCI cards would be good but they seem to be getting scarce on eBay. The only current ATI card that fits in a PCI slot is the Radeon Mac Edition 9200 with 128MB VRAM. I can tell you from personal experience (and that of others) that this card does not play well with OS9. <rant>I've written ATI about my OS9 problems and they basically answered that they do not consider OS9 worth supporting any more.</rant> The 9200 works fine under OSX.
Good candidates ("retail" means the card was once sold separately in a fancy box, and "OEM" means the card was sold directly to Apple for installation in new computers and later pulled):
-- ATI Rage 128 Orion: Has a 128-bit GPU and 16MB VRAM and was one of the best cards for OS9 and earlier. Still a very capable worker that even does well under OSX. Has one VGA port.
-- ATI PCI Rage Pro 128: the OEM equivalent of the Orion. Same comments but is more available on the used/pulled market.
-- ATI Rage 128 Nexus: As near as I can tell the card is nearly identical to the Orion except the latest versions carry 32MB VRAM. A very nice card but hard to find. May have more ports but I've not owned one.
-- ATI Radeon Mac Edition (the "original' with no numbers after the name): IMHO the finest Mac video card ever. Was quite expensive new and has a much faster GPU than the Rage 128 cards. 32MB VRAM. The "original" was replaced by the Radeon Mac Edition 7000 (below) to lower the retail price point to the US$120 level that ATI seems to keep for their home-user cards. The original Radeon was physically different from its replacement in that it has a cooling fan integrated with the GPU's heat sick and five large black circuit chips prominent. Mine has DVI, S-video, and VGA ports.
--ATI Radeon Mac Edition 7000: as mentioned, this replaced the original Radeon but, in lowering the price point, ATI also took away some performance (see this benchmark test). The RME7000 has a passive heat sink on the GPU and four large black circuit chips.
Remember that you are shopping for a PCI card. Most of the cards I see on eBay are AGP that cannot be used in anything older than a G4 "Sawtooth" PowerMac. Also, some cards offered on eBay are really PC versions whose ROM has been "flashed" to trick them into being a Mac card. Some work OK and others do not. I would not recommend a flashed ATI card to a Mac newcomer. Let the experts play with those.
How to spot a flashed video card? Not easy unless the seller is forthright in the description. However, most of the flashed cards I've seen are the Radeon PC Edition 7000 that had 64MB VRAM. ATI never built a Mac PCI card with 64MB of VRAM so that is a dead giveaway that the card has been flashed.
I've heard that nVidea have some older non-ATI drivers (ix, 3dFx, etc) on there web site. There is also a site called MacDriveMuseum that is worth checking. Maybe a new driver will "wake up" your current card and you won't need to find a newer one.
Regarding the processor upgrade, I offer this for your consideration--those are still quite expensive and may not help you that much. Your 9600 will still have a 50mHz bus that will always be the bottleneck. A friend of mine put a G3/400 upgrade in a 7600/132 and was very disappointed with the very modest speed gain. She said that, had she known, she would not have done it.
Hope this helps,
Allan