Using a 500gb 7200rpm drive with a simple SATA/PATA adapter, boot time is still 45-50 seconds... Is that normal?
Actually, yes. My MDD with 7200rpm old IDE drive and a shitpile of extensions takes about 50sec to the desktop and another 15-20 for everything on the desktop to finish up and appear. I would expect yours to be a little bit faster, but not necessarily all that much. You should have your boot drive connected to the ATA100 bus in the
back - not the slower ATA66 under the optical drives. BUT, no matter what it won't get a lot better at boot unless and until you change to an SSD.
That will fly by comparison. Just get a small, relatively inexpensive one to hold the System and Apps, and use your 500Gb for data.
Ive noticed the SimpleText application can take up to 7 seconds to open a document <10kb - is this normal? I guess I am sensitive to this sort of thing becauss I am questioning if everything is performing as it should...
Simpletext is slooow…and simple… and slooow. It's a leftover from the 68k Classic Mac days. Go to Macintosh Garden and download SimpleEdit 3. It's a huge improvement overall.
You should also remember there are some aspects of OS9 that are simply, well… older than current stuff. While it's generally snappier and more responsive than the later "cats" (mostly because it doesn't bother with all of the glitz and bling) you should avoid trying to make direct comparisons on every little thing. Example #1 being that an SATA-to-PATA adapter doesn't suddenly make the bus move at latter-day SATA speeds. It just enables the drive to work on the PATA bus.
And now…the iffy part.I have an M-Audio Midiman Midisport 2x4, exactly as in the picture in the MIDI interface thread. I downloaded the driver for it from the M-Audio site, which was actually just the OMS software. Every time I plug it in to a USB port I get a notification that a driver cant be found (and it wants to search online) am I missing something here?
Step 1: Start by checking to see that the Apple "USB Device Extension" and "USB Authoring Support" extensions are installed and enabled.
Step 2: As far as I know…there is
no OS9 driver specifically for the MIDISport. The M-Audio driver database is wrong. It shows a driver but as you discovered, it's only a copy of OMS for MIDI. You should try the "Audiophile USB" driver package:
Audiophile_OSX_1_2_2f1.zipYes, I
know it says "OSX". Just download the package and read the read-me. It will point you toward using ASIO on your DAW and the damn thing
should work without a special ASIO driver. Emphasis on
should.
It it works, say a little thank-you to your God. If not, know that you have lots of company. M-Audio interfaces are all over the place in terms of whether or not they work in OS9 with different Macs. At the time, USB was new and OS9 was declared dead. Everybody was focused on OSX so some things are hit-and-miss.