If you bought OS X Tiger thinking that Apple’s new Quartz 2D Extreme would accelerate your Powerbook, you were surely disappointed when you found out that Apple had shipped Tiger with Quartz 2D Extreme disabled!

Perhaps some day in a future 10.4 update Apple will eventually enable it, but for now, even if I enable it, the accelerated video only lasts a few minutes and then my Powerbook locks up solid. However, I did try a different form of video acceleration that does work. If you have an ATI video card, you can try overclocking it with ATIcceleratorII.

I have tried it on both my Powerbook and G4 desktop and the results are very stable and the boosted video speed helps with almost every application, including the Mac OS X Finder, which is very much needed.

Since this is a form of overclocking, you will want to make sure that you overclock only in small increments and that your computer is adequately cooled and not operating in high-temperature environment.

ATIcceleratorII can adjust both video memory and gpu speeds. You can find multiple user reports on Xlr8yourmac.com.

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Mac OS X 10.4 users have plenty of options for viewing Google’s PageRank. Here are three very colorful widgets for keeping tabs of your site’s PageRank:

The first widget is from Ran Aroussi. Entitled simply Google PageRank, Aroussi’s Dashboard widget allows you to enter any url and receive instant PageRank status.

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Here is a good tip for Mac OS X computers trying to connect to a local Windows2003 Server that has ActiveDirectory running.

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Over the weekend I noticed that browsing in Safari and in Firefox was significantly slower than normal and since I had upgraded my Powerbook to Mac OS X Tiger, I figured it was probably a bug and Apple would fix it in 10.4.2 or some other update. However I started to look at it and see if I could fix it myself.

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Obsessive Compulsive Development has written a hack that they call Taboo. This hack enables warning dialog when you try to close out of Safari and there are multiple tabs open. This feature resembles the one in Firefox. Taboo’s other function is that you can disable the warning dialog that now appears when opening a download file automatically. Many users find this feature annoying in Mac OS X Tiger, even though it provides extra security.

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