10.4.6 on a Dell Dimension 9100

[dalaibobra]

This was my first foray into loading OSx86 & this forum helped me a lot. I appreciate the excellent info provided by you people out there who know what the hell you are doing! Thanks!

 

Anyways, I have gotten 10.4.6 (Hot ISO I believe) successfully installed on a Dell Dimension 9100 w/ the following specs:

 

- Intel Pentium D 925 3GHz, dual core LGA775, 4mb L2 Cache (this is not the original processor to the machine & is a very recent iteration of the D processors)

- (1) 512mb 667 5300 RAM (temporary, plan on upgrading soon; sorry don't know brand)

 

- PCI GeForce MX 4000 128mb (extremely temporary, plan on updating soon)

 

- 80gig Serial SATA drive - only drive in the machine, only SATA anything in machine

 

- (2) PATA DVD drives, 1 burnable, don't know the brands (not at computer, sorry)

 

- Belkin (?) Firewire 400 PCI card - Texas Instruments Chipset

 

- Built in: ethernet, USB

 

OSx86 was installed on a single partition, no other OSes. In the custom options of the install disc I chose the 10.4.6 Combo Update Combo, Intel SSE2, Intel SSE3 and nothing else. Installation went off w/out issue, I set that single partition to "Active" via fdisk on the install disc. After that OSX booted fine, albeit very slowly.

 

What is working:

 

USB, Firewire, video (only 1024x768 though), DVD (can burn discs)

 

What isn't working:

 

ethernet; although the System Profile recognizes the built-in ethernet, when you go into the Network preferences "Built-in Ethernet" is greyed out and you can't edit the settings for it at all. I've also noticed that after a couple restarts, OSX doesn't see the ethernet at all anymore. It had worked fine when XP was loaded on this machine last week. I am assuming that the chipset is intel.

 

What is weird:

 

- System profile lists the processor as 4GHz & system bus at 3.2GHz

- System/IO Lag (?): doing any kind of IO is really slow initially. For instance, it took about 15 seconds for Finder to display the contents of the Applications folder. It took the same amount of time to right click on a couple of files to choose the "Open with" options. Mounting external drives/discs is glacially slow, takes maybe 30seconds to a minute to show up.

 

Although it takes awhile to mount discs, actual IO seems normal once it starts. Copying from an external USB & firewire drive to the SATA internal went at acceptable speeds. DVD read/write seems normal.

 

General performance is decent. Handbrake encoded a VIDEO_TOS main title to mpeg4 @ 80fps. Program launch is really slow though & UI has some unacceptable lag at seemingly odd times.

 

What to do:

 

I'd like to install 10.4.8 but the JaS re-seed disc I have won't load on this computer. It starts to boot and then kernal panics. How can I upgrade (I don't really know where to find all these kexts & hacks people talk about on the forum)?

 

Will 10.4.8 resolve any of these issues mentioned?

 

Thanks for your time.

 

[Vertigo50]

For your ethernet issue:

 

Check in your System folder, and see if you have an "Extensions Backup" folder. (It might be in Library) If so, take the IONetworking.kext from there, and put it in your Extensions folder. Overwrite the original. (you may want to back the original up first)

 

Then delete the Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext files in the Extensions folder.

Go to disk utility and repair permissions.

Reboot.

 

It worked for me, because the older version was compatible with my ethernet card. I can't guarantee it will work for you, but give it a shot.

 

If it doesn't, it may be easier for you to just get an ethernet card that is compatible rather than spend hours trying to fix the problems.

[dalaibobra]

yeah, the ethernet is easily fixed with $15 bucks. Thanks for a potential software fix though!

 

I guess I am most interested in moving to 10.4.8 but don't know the process for that & I can't currently get the JaS DVD to install; as well as wondering about the lagging UI and whether that's a lack of QE/CI from the {censored} video card. I am going to add another 512mb of RAM and hope that the sluggish performance is changed a bit.....