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Just streaming Drone Zone on my Mojave MacPro with Screen Sharing connected to my Snow Leopard Mini (left) and my Catalina Mini (right).

Super Bowl Sunday gets real exciting around here! :rolleyes:

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did i post on this before?

I must've posted on this before

but if i haven't - this, this is what I've done with an early Intel Mac lately. I'd be using my 2007 17-incher but THAT ONE has its sound set to "Wake up the whole entire neighbourhood" mode. I will be getting its PRAM fixed so it doesn't reset every time but... for now it'll only be turned on during appropriate hours. Ah to live in an apartment with walls thinner than wet toilet paper - 0/10, would not recommend.
 
did i post on this before?

I must've posted on this before

but if i haven't - this, this is what I've done with an early Intel Mac lately. I'd be using my 2007 17-incher but THAT ONE has its sound set to "Wake up the whole entire neighbourhood" mode. I will be getting its PRAM fixed so it doesn't reset every time but... for now it'll only be turned on during appropriate hours. Ah to live in an apartment with walls thinner than wet toilet paper - 0/10, would not recommend.
Adding a BassJump2 might cause cracks in the wall ... ?
 
@Baldung99 Just press a pillow down on the top-case every time you switch it on ;)

(Reminds me how it annoyed me the first time I discovered that inserting a minijack into the headphone output of a MacBook versus a PowerBook doesn't mute the sound of the startup chime...)
 
did i post on this before?

I must've posted on this before

but if i haven't - this, this is what I've done with an early Intel Mac lately. I'd be using my 2007 17-incher but THAT ONE has its sound set to "Wake up the whole entire neighbourhood" mode. I will be getting its PRAM fixed so it doesn't reset every time but... for now it'll only be turned on during appropriate hours. Ah to live in an apartment with walls thinner than wet toilet paper - 0/10, would not recommend.

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You want this prefPane.

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Today I accomplished a particular monitor task. Some time ago, my neighbors left a Toshiba 1080p HDTV out front with a 'FREE' sign and I grabbed it. That was a few months before I undertook cleaning the garage again, but I did have a plan for that monitor.

In restructuring my garage, I set out four displays for the Late 2009 Mac Mini that I have. Three of them are 1680x1050 and the HDTV is 1080p.

One display is at my feet. That's the main monitor where my Finder windows and drives will be. One display is to the right, it will show PDFs/Word files I wish to have open for reference and application palettes. The primary display for InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator is the HDTV which is above and behind the monitor at my feet. Above that and slightly behind is the fourth display which will be for anything else I need. Since it's so far back it'll be stuff that I don't necessarily need to see clearly.

Attached via BT is a Magic keyboard and a Magic trackpad. Both allow me to sit how I like in the comfortable chair I have in the garage and not be encumbered by cables.

The critical piece here is a SIIG DisplayLink USB adapter that I saw on eBay several months back. It's for Mac. I had some issues getting it to work, but that I think is mainly down to other issues (related below) rather than the device itself.

First off - the DisplayLink app didn't work. So, I tried the USB driver, which also didn't work initially. Due to some issues with Catalina, I decided just to wipe the SSD and reinstall patched Mojave. I did that today. The Mini is not my primary Mac and there is nothing on there that I can't copy back over or reinstall. Dropbox is on the RAID attached to the Mini so there is no issue there.

Things I learned via trial and error and some Googling.

• Boot with the USB displays disconnected. After login, connect the displays. That's fine, since the Mini will be on 24/7 so I don't have many reboots.

• Turning off mirroring pretty much stopped everything working. So, I tried the lowest common denominator and switched the HDTV to 640x480. Low and behold, all four displays got their own separate signal! AT THE CORRECT RESOLUTION!

• I have to be a little more patient in waiting for any resolution/arrangement changes as it takes the device a couple of seconds to update to the HDTV and the fourth display.

I've got things to put back, apps to reinstall and I foresee four new desktop backgrounds. But right now it's working.

I have four displays attached to my Mac Mini!

(Oh, excuse the fact that you cannot see all four complete in each pic. I cannot get back far enough to get a wider shot). EDIT: The Mini and the RAID are BEHIND the display on the floor!

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I have four displays attached to my Mac Mini!
Behold the horror glory of DisplayLink! What's the lag like via USB 2.0 when e.g. moving windows or playing video on the USB displays? And what's the CPU usage like? These are the main reasons I'm staying away from DisplayLink... it's laggy, creates CPU load and the drivers have a history of quirks.

The critical piece here is a SIIG DisplayLink USB adapter that I saw on eBay several months back. It's for Mac.
The DisplayLink drivers for macOS should™ work with any USB DisplayLink adapter.

First off - the DisplayLink app didn't work. So, I tried the USB driver, which also didn't work initially. Due to some issues with Catalina, I decided just to wipe the SSD and reinstall patched Mojave.
You're lucky that you don't need High Sierra because IIRC DisplayLink devices don't work properly on it. :)
 
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Behold the horror glory of DisplayLink! What's the lag like via USB 2.0 when e.g. moving windows or playing video on the USB displays? And what's the CPU usage like? These are the main reasons I'm staying away from DisplayLink... it's laggy, creates CPU load and the drivers have a history of quirks.
I will have to get back to you. Right now it's a stock/virgin install, except for the DisplayLink driver. Other than a delay when switching resolutions and a tendency to forget some display settings after waking the displays there seems to be no lag. I don't currently have iStat installed and did not think to open Activity Monitor.


The DisplayLink drivers for macOS should™ work with any USB DisplayLink adapter.
Yes, those are the ones I used. It just took some trial and error to realize there were two different types (an app and a driver). It was the app that was not working and I had to trial and error the driver.


You're lucky that you don't need High Sierra because IIRC DisplayLink devices don't work properly on it. :)
Well, I would not be using this on my work MBP and I'd try rolling back to 10.3.3 if I needed HS on my own systems. It's 10.13.4 to 10.13.6 where it becomes an issue.
 
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Ran back to back zoom and teams meetings on a 2008 17 MBP4,1 with its ram maxed at 6 and an SSD installed, via a USB HD cam with no hickups! That with MSword and Pages and Excel docs open and Preview, safari and some other apps being used. ElCap is on it. Was quite impressed. While no lighting-quick when switching apps, the most outlandish was Teams that took about 2 minutes to load. Otherwise fully workable sans airdrop.
 
So, it would appear that the functioning of my DisplayLink device on my Mini was a fluke. As I feared, a restart pretty much nuked my ability to use it. Tried for several hours on Friday to get it to work and no dice. Sigh.

Oh well, it's a patched OS and shouldn't really be running Mojave anyway. Workaround time.

Out goes the DisplayLink device, in comes the Early 2009 Mac Mini. I never replaced the 320GB HD on this Mac and it still has 4GB ram and a Mojave install. It picked up exactly where I left it last summer.

So, the bottom display is Display 1 of the Late 2009 Mini, the TV is Display 2. The right display is Display 1 of the Early 2009 Mini and the top display is Display 2. Will be using the Early 2009 Mini to stream music to my HK loudspeaker.

I still get what I want, it just takes two Macs to do it.

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Oh, Late 2009 on bottom, early 2009 on top. That's the RAID (ICY Dock) to the left which is connected to the Late 2009.
 
Would trying it on fully supported El Capitan be worth it?
No, not really. High Sierra is as far as I'd step down and I really do not want to. I've got a dark mode script that works for HS which I got when my MP was on High Sierra and that still makes things bearable on my work MBP. But I want to run Adobe CC21 (at least ID CC21) and I don't believe El Cap will support that.

It's worked out okay. I have the L2009 Mini hooked up to my speaker and the E2009 Mini is using Airplay to stream to the L2009 Mini - which means the music goes to the speaker. It means I can kind of combine stuff because the L2009 Mini is also sending it's sound there.

And with the E2009 Mini already having the apps I need/want installed I can put stuff up on those two smaller screens as I planned.

I just have a little bit more tweaking of stuff to go before everything is back to normal. Surprisingly, it's Vivaldi that is being my main problem now. It does not want to work above version 3+. SMH.
 
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Surprisingly, it's Vivaldi that is being my main problem now. It does not want to work above version 3+. SMH.
So, now I recall. Apparently on the Mini(s) I am stuck on this version. The MP has 5.x, so I stupidly copied it and prefs over to the L2009 Mini and not from the E2009 Mini.

So, I went and copied them over from the E2009 Mini and now everything is back to 'normal'. Having to relogin to sites is a pain, but that is a minor thing.
 
I think I scored a pretty sweet late 2012 Mac Mini. I wouldn't consider it early Intel, but I wouldn't consider it new either :p . In any case, it's one hell of an upgrade compared to my iMac from late 2006. The reason I wanted one was because I recently bought a big fancy new monitor and while I did try out using my iMac connected to it, I decided that it was a better idea to just buy a second hand Mac Mini which had at least a Metal GPU and 16gb of ram.
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I didn't even bother to haggle over the price since it's pretty tough anyways to find a fully upgraded i7 Mac Mini for below €200, especially with an SSD!

Now it's on to the waiting game and to hope it arrives in one piece, but I will definitely show it off in action probably running Monterey or Mojave later this week!
 
Apple says I can't run Windows 7 64-bit on my Macbook 5,2.

Everymac says I can if I find the right drivers.

A random apple forums discussion says you can modify bootcamp to work on Macs that it refuses to install to with a MSI editor.

Windows 7 64-bit is now running on my 5,2 perfectly with a slightly modified bootcamp 4!
 
Got out my late 2009 Mini that was gathering dust and decided to open it up and put in 4 GB of RAM and an SSD I had laying around. I initially put Snow Leopard on it and everything was great until my airport card started refusing to connect to my home Wi-Fi after installing the last round of updates via Software Update. I restarted the Mac, disabled IPv6, zapped the PRAM, but none of that helped. I decided to try a different OS X version and decided to put Leopard on here, inspired by a recent thread about Leopard. I achieved this by putting the Mini into TDM and using my 2006 MBP to do the installation and updating to 10.5.8. Despite not being officially supported, the Mini did successfully boot into 10.5.8. There was some graphical glitching upon first boot, but that went away in subsequent boots. The name of the Mac still has macbookpro in the name instead of macmini, but System Profiler provides the correct info. The built-in Wi-Fi is working just fine even after applying all the updates. Leopard and Universal apps really do run better on here than on the Sawtooth. The Intel build of PPCMC runs really nice on here too. Both QuickTime and PPCMC start up faster than they do on the Sawtooth. The big downside with Intel Leopard is that not all PPC native software runs as intended or in some cases not at all. This is part of why I keep going back to the Sawtooth for my Leopard needs (the other part being that I am just really attached to the Sawtooth, even though I have "better" Mac hardware now), even though web browsing and video playback is significantly better on a Core2Duo. Speaking of web browsing, I wonder what the future of web browsing will be for Intel Leopard since TFF went into hobby mode? Maybe I'll have to finally learn how to build TFF and make my own builds. I did install Xcode on here in case I decided to get into programming stuff for Leopard.
 
Got out my late 2009 Mini that was gathering dust and decided to open it up and put in 4 GB of RAM and an SSD I had laying around. I initially put Snow Leopard on it and everything was great until my airport card started refusing to connect to my home Wi-Fi after installing the last round of updates via Software Update. I restarted the Mac, disabled IPv6, zapped the PRAM, but none of that helped. I decided to try a different OS X version and decided to put Leopard on here, inspired by a recent thread about Leopard. I achieved this by putting the Mini into TDM and using my 2006 MBP to do the installation and updating to 10.5.8. Despite not being officially supported, the Mini did successfully boot into 10.5.8. There was some graphical glitching upon first boot, but that went away in subsequent boots. The name of the Mac still has macbookpro in the name instead of macmini, but System Profiler provides the correct info. The built-in Wi-Fi is working just fine even after applying all the updates. Leopard and Universal apps really do run better on here than on the Sawtooth. The Intel build of PPCMC runs really nice on here too. Both QuickTime and PPCMC start up faster than they do on the Sawtooth. The big downside with Intel Leopard is that not all PPC native software runs as intended or in some cases not at all. This is part of why I keep going back to the Sawtooth for my Leopard needs (the other part being that I am just really attached to the Sawtooth, even though I have "better" Mac hardware now), even though web browsing and video playback is significantly better on a Core2Duo. Speaking of web browsing, I wonder what the future of web browsing will be for Intel Leopard since TFF went into hobby mode? Maybe I'll have to finally learn how to build TFF and make my own builds. I did install Xcode on here in case I decided to get into programming stuff for Leopard.
With a 2.93GHz C2D PPCMC7 literally can stream a 720p YouTube video in ~5 seconds. The speed hack I found for rpi's and implemented in PPCMC7 does wonders.

Intel Tiger and Leopard are insanely overlooked by most people. They are so optimized and fast compared to most newer Mac OS versions. They also allow you to install any software without having to go through system preferences settings like modern Mac OS. Plus, macports works really well for such an old OS thanks to people like @kencu .
 
Intel Tiger and Leopard are insanely overlooked by most people. They are so optimized and fast compared to most newer Mac OS versions. They also allow you to install any software without having to go through system preferences settings like modern Mac OS.
The same can be said about Snow Leopard, which almost any Intel Mac released in 2011 or earlier can run. If I had to decide between Leopard and Snow Leopard, I'd always go for the latter. Tiger (more precisely, its UI), however, will always hold a special space in my heart.
 
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Got my Mini. Immediately updated it to Monterey with OCLP. I can't believe how much faster this one is compared to the Core 2 Duo machines I'm used to. Not to mention Handoff is a really nice feature I didn't know I needed.

Excuse the mess since I haven't found a place to tuck it away in yet :p

Now if only Apple fixes those weird artifacts on the side of borders of most transparent things. I heard they fixed it in 12.3 so I guess I'll have to wait
 
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