The last couple months have been very busy with geeky Mac stuff. Nate gave me two laptops to sell, a PowerBook G4 and an older iBook G3. They were both broken when I got them. The powerbook and Nate have a long history, and on one occasion I saved Nate’s data from it when the hard drive died (see this link). I replaced the hard drive more recently (blog post here).
The iBook I got from Scott, a guy whose site I designed and host (he’s on our links page). He got it from a friend of his and it was old and so he gave it to me. Jill was using it for a while as her laptop, but it had no wireless card and was old and slow. I set it up for Nate when his PowerBook died and he was happy with it for some time, but then it unexpectedly died when he was over to our place. We couldn’t figure out why at the time. Turns out it was the power cord – it was badly frayed and couldn’t recharge the battery or power the computer, so it died.
So recently I sold these two laptops (after fixing the drive). Also I bought Jill an iBook G4 to replace our iMac 1gHz G4 “Bowtie”. So I sold that machine too – it was my web server for years (blog post on that here). Jill is very happy with her new laptop. It has basically the same specs as Bowtie did, but it’s portable and is no longer the server (which means it can be put to sleep and transported at will). She can join me in this room and surf or email, which is convenient for her.
Finally, the kicker. This past week I got Jill’s blessing to get a Mac Pro – basically the pinnacle of Apple power:
Jill and I drove up to the store in NH to avoid over a hundred bucks of sales tax, and it was a fun date. I also ordered a 24” monitor to go with it, but I’m borrowing my friend Dan’s until it arrives.I gotta say, this thing cooks. I’ve bought iMacs for years, which are nice machines but not upgradeable and lack the power of a tower. Here’s some of what changed:
2gHz G5 PowerPC chip –> 2 x 2.8gHz Intel 4-core chips (8 cores total)
128MB VRAM –> 256MB ATI card (upgradeable!)
667mHz bus –> 1.6gHz bus
OSX 10.4 –> OSX 10.5
512KB L2 Cache –> 12MB L2 Cache (per processor)
250GB hard drive –>320GB (expandable to four drives)
The upgrade here is very noticeable. Today I did a little stress test:
Here I’m running iTunes (playing) with visualizer, QuickTime player (playing mp3), Logic Express (playing a few tracks with effects), VLC player (playing a movie), World of Warcraft (all settings up and 40 FPS), my backup script, and miscellaneous other programs. As you can see, the processor is up to a whopping 17% with nothing slowing down in the slightest. I can’t really get it much past that no matter what I do. It’s crazy!
This box is huge and heavy compared to the iMac, but I’m excited about keeping it for many years and upgrading as necessary rather than buying a whole new computer in three years. It’s also very quiet compared to the iMac, which is nice for our small place.
