Ended up getting the same one Tommyrot did. There as open box Linux one for $315, and I can't find the XP one for less than $370. Given my modest needs in this area, the difference is not worth it, though I may narrow that difference by buying a six cell battery.

I'm doing a clean install (Erase & Install) of Leopard onto one of our office Macs. It's been saying "About 9 minutes" for at least 20 minutes now. Suggestions?

I'd wait some more. Those estimates are often off by a lot.

Is it a newer (i.e. fast) Mac, or an older one?

eta: Is there any other sign of activity? Is the HD doin' stuff? If so, then things are probably fine.

It's a G5, about 3.5 years old.

It was chugging along fine until this point, and now it seems to be stuck.

Maybe it's just gotten to the "erase" portion and discovered that there's 150GB of crap on this machine and given up in despair?

Still hanging and I have to leave work in 5 minutes. Can I safely turn off this machine and start over tomorrow or will that completely fuck things up?

Since you're doing a clean install, I'd think there'd be no risk to just shutting it off and starting over. (The clean install starts with the disk being reformatted, right?)

no questions or answers. Just popping on to show geek love in a room of folks who would appreciate it.

For work, we are using OS-X-10.5 ability to "Screen Share". It is true geek love. So much better than Timbuktu or VNC or a KVM extender. AND, both the Sound Designer AND me are doing it to the same computer at the same time (ok, so we share the mouse function, but at least it doesn't say "only one at a time"). Anyhow, very cool and geek love in abundance.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what the ramifications of the screen share is? Which computer does it tax? What does it tax? CPU? Video? RAM? or does it spread the load around? OK, maybe I did have some questions after all.

It's pretty much just a VNC client. Pretty low overhead. I've used it with Qlab machines on macs a few times and even with multiple log ins on each end haven't noticed an appreciable difference. You can always run Activity Monitor and keep an eye on the RAM and CPU usage while things are at idle.

My DVD player has been being a pain lately -- skipping around and pausing randomly, sometimes getting so that it plays about a second of movie, followed by a second of nothing, for a good minute or two. It's happening with any disc I try to play, so it's not that the disc is scratched. The tray to put the disk on was a little dusty, so I cleaned that off, but it didn't help. I'm suspecting there might be dust on the lens. Is there some way to clean that? Or any other suggestions about what might be the problem?

I've seen this cleaner thing for CD players that's basically a blank disk with a tiny brush on it. Maybe the same kind of thing would work for DVDs?