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September 16, 2006
The Mac Pro
After owning an iMac for over two years I felt it was time to upgrade, and I picked up a customized Mac Pro after the announcement at MWDC. It arrived earlier this week and I've begin to make the transition from the iMac G5, and the Mac Pro.
I have one thing to say for a while now. Apparently, I have a huge habit of sticking a DVD/CD in the side of the screen because I've done it 5 times in the last three days and much to my surprise the 23" ACD is not A) As thick as the iMac was and B) It's a PITA to get a dropped CD/DVD from behind my desk.
Technorati Tags:
Mac OS X, Boot Camp, Mac Pro, iMac G5, Rosetta
So I purchased a loaded (for me) up Mac Pro this week. The system I ordered back on August 7th includes:
- 2xIntel Xeon 5150 (2.66BHz) dual core processors
- 2GB of RAM (4x512MB)
- 500GB HDD
- ATI XT1900 256MB Video Card
- 16x Superdrive
- 23" Apple Cinema Display
- AppleCare 3 year Warranty
- Airport Extreme & Bluetooth 2.0 Module
- Wireless Keyboard & Mighty Mouse
Quite the upgrade from an iMac G5 1.8GHz I picked up back in 2004. I was looking forward to some performance improvements in video editing, photo editing, and audio editing I've been doing.
So far I've been up and running about two days with it. It came in Wednesday afternoon. It took about seven hours to transfer the data from my iMac to the Mac Pro using Apple's Migration Assistant. It's pretty slick how easy it is to use these days. You fire up your new machine, it walks you through connecting them together with a firewire cable, and then you turn on your old machine while holding the T on the keyboard down and the machine is in target mode and acts like a big HDD.
Then the Migration assistant takes over. It copied all my data, and all my applications over. I did discover this morning that it did not copy Photoshop correctly and I had to re-install it. Photoshop itself made it, however it missed the plugins directory and a few other things which it was just easier to re-install. But compared to the Windows world of upgrading that's pretty simple by comparison.
So far I've tested the video card by playing World of Warcraft at full 1900x1200 resolution as well as downloading the QUake 4 demo that runs natively on the Mac. However I'd intended to try out Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop for Mac. However I'm cheap and don't want to buy Windows XP this close to the Windows Vista launch. Windows Vista RC1 is available and rumored to work on some folks machines so I signed up for the RC1 and downloaded it.
This is when I discovered two things.
- Downloading a 3.1GB Image on DSL takes a while
- Finding out after the fact that Parallels does not support 64 bit processors inside a VM means you then have to go back and download the 32 bit version later that day at 2.1GB takes even more time
- Boot Camp doesn't support your fancy wireless keyboard/mouse
- Getting back out of Windows boot mode means you have to dig the box back out of the attic and get the install DVDs and run disk utility to switch it back to boot from Mac OS X
- Uninstalling Boot Camp is but simple
So right now I have fedora core 5 installing in a VM because I've yet to figure out how to install Vista RC1. Granted the OS is experimental still, as is the version of Parallels I'm running. So I'm not surprised I'm running into issues to be fair. I've posted a few questions on some forums to see if anyone has been successful or if I should just give it up. I need to get a small version of Windows running so that I can continue to use Microsoft Money until someone designs a working Mac financial software package. Quicken is not it.
Posted by trekkie at September 16, 2006 12:34 PM
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