David Hurst

I installed Leopard on my MacBook Pro the day it came out. I pre-ordered, obviously. I have an external backup drive that I use with my MacBook, so that was Time Machine sorted there, but I also have a PowerMac G4 at home and I don’t have another decent size external USB hard disk. However, the PowerMac does have a second backup hard disk inside, and I thought it would be really cool to just have Time Machine running on this disk. Apple does state in all its literature for Leopard that you need an external USB or FireWire hard disk to use Time Machine.

Well, as it turns out, Leopard is perfectly happy to use the second internal hard disk. Just open System Preferences and go to the Time Machine pane and you can select an alternative internal disk. If this is true, it should also be possible to run Time Machine on a single hard disk that has been partitioned. This is a much better way of working, particularly if you are a mobile worker. Frankly, I can’t be bothered to lug an external mains powered hard disk with me everywhere I go, which means my machine is only backed up when I’m in the office. I would partition the disk, if there was enough space, but the 120Gb disk just isn’t big enough for my needs.

Whilst we’re on the subject of Leopard, and having mentioned my PowerMac G4, you may be wondering how the latest OS runs on these older machines. My PowerMac G4 is the MDD (mirrored drive doors) version with FireWire 800. It has a G4 1GHz processor, 1.5Gb RAM and a 64MB ATi Radeon 9000 Pro AGP graphics card. I have to be honest, it is slower than Tiger. I guess that should be a given considering all the extra features that are running. It could probably do with a bit more RAM and it almost certainly needs a graphics card upgrade (which I won’t be doing due to the outrageous cost of such an upgrade). I think the main problem is the glass dock. It seemed to really slow the whole system down. But… there is a solution!

Did you know you can turn off the glass dock in Leopard and replace it with a simpler version that doesn’t tax your graphics card? It’s pretty simple to do, and I think the alternative dock is still attractive and nice to use. You need to open Terminal and type the commands below. You’ll find Terminal in your /Applications/Utilities folder.

To switch Leopard’s glass dock off:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock


Take care to write the two lines exactly as shown.

To switch the glass dock back on again:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock