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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=624
Will the Real FireWire Please Stand Up?
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
July 9th 2002
Still plug-and-pray on the Dark Side.
All IEEE-1394 PCs are equal. Aren''t they? But some are more equal than others.
That''s what Peter Coffee on eWeek found out when he tried plugging FireWire
peripherals into Windows boxes. Coffee''s conclusion? "Pick the Apple" if you want
real plug-and-play.
Among the many difficulties Coffee found were:
- a required BIOS upgrade to use a hard drive of a certain capacity.
- a need to install Win 98 SE to get FireWire support happening (not easy when he was
running Win NT).
- A Win 98 SE machine which wouldn''t boot to the GUI when an update was applied,
forcing the user to resort to a command line
- A call to tech support to get Win 2000 to admit a FireWire drive was attached, which
involved multi-menu navigations before the disk would show up in Explorer.
Compared with the instant plug-and-play access of FireWire drives on the PowerBook G4,
this was, says Coffee, "depressing". For Windows.
Coffee also stresses that the equipment he was using (hard drives) were non-Apple, in
non-Apple cases from a non-Apple vendor.
Nor did the Mac complain when Windows formatted the drive and it came back to the
PowerBook as a PC drive.
Analysis: What would have happened with XP? I have no idea, but Coffee asks, quite
reasonably, why he should have to pay to upgrade to XP with a 6-month old laptop with
2000, just to get FireWire working like it should?
There''s nothing here that isn''t blindingly obvious to any Mac user. But it merely
reinforces Apple message to PC users:
"Switch."
Post your comments at:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=624
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