Angela and I got a new iMac a couple of weeks ago for the home office. First of all, I have to admit we feel a little dumb buying one in light of recent events which are going to suck up all our money and time before too long. However, we really needed to get a new PC for the house as well as simplify our home office (the fact that I’m about to sell three old computers on eBay should indicate how clunked up the office was). To that end, doing this now rather than this time next year made more sense, and that old computer didn’t have another year in it at the pace we were using it (although it will make a great PC for someone).
Unboxing our new iMac didn’t take long: there’s only one cord and three parts (monitor, keyboard, and mouse).
Speaking of selling old computers, I just began running DBAN on my old Dell desktop. It’s a weird feeling for me putting that disc in the drive, knowing full well the devastation I’m about to wreak on the hard disk. A bit like taking Lenny out back to show him the “rabbits.” Anyway, I’ve taken my time getting everything off of that machine and backed-up on our NAS, as well as keeping working copies of most stuff on the new Mac. By the way, getting e‑mail out of Outlook and onto a mac has to be the most miserable thing to do when “switching.” I spent more time doing that than any other task, and I had two 250 GB drives nearly full on that machine (I also had a lot of e‑mail, dating back to around 1999).
Anyway, I’ve got Parallels Beta 3 running on the new iMac and that is an awesome program. I had installed the old version I bought and wasn’t too impressed with it running Ubuntu 6, but after upgrading to the most recent version I’m completely blown away. In full screen mode, it is exactly as if you’re running the OS native (although I’ve yet to be able to get it to take advantage of better than 1024x768 screen resolution). I’ve only run Linux so far, but I’ve ordered OEM copies of both Windows XP and Vista and I hope to have those installed next month. I’ve heard really good things about it running XP, and quite frankly even though it’s virtualization, it couldn’t be any slower than my 3 Ghz P4 had gotten. Vista is probably going to be less-than-stellar in Parallels, and I don’t expect a lot of the flashy GUI effects to work. However, it will give me the opportunity to keep on top of the Windows environment for a few more years. It’s pretty exciting to have four OS’s on one very sleek and elegant box. For such large screen, I suddenly have loads more desk space and our tiny office seems just a bit bigger.
porting all my old e‑mail is about to make me pull my hair out and transferring over 18,000 photos into iPhoto took hours
I’ve been using Photoshop CS3 Beta for the past week on the iMacThanks, Trey and Henry for helping me use the Beta for more than the initial two-day trial. and I have to say, I’m really impressed. First of all, it’s finally in Universal Binary so it will run natively on the Intel processor. That means it’s insanely fast for such a large piece of software. Photoshop now loads as fast as iPhoto (probably faster, considering my iPhoto library is around 19,350 images). Feature-wise, I’m not exactly a power-user, so I don’t notice many differences between the previous CS2 version and this Beta, though I’m sure that many exist. Also, I was using CS2 on a PC and now I’m on a Mac and I don’t know how similar the versions on those two platforms were to begin with. Either way, I’m very impressed with the speed of CS3 on this machine. It just feels very lightweight, even though it’s a huge piece of software.
I’ve also been just getting used to the differences of being in OS X versus XP. The differences come in both large and small. Large would be the obvious items where as the small were things I never much thought about, such as the different behavior of the home and end keys, which I use often. This, despite the fact that my wife has been using a mac for a year-and-a-half now. However, I’ve not run into any huge problems that I couldn’t find solutions to yet. Fortunately, if when that does happen, a number of my friends and family are power Mac users and I can hopefully get help from them you (you do read this stuff, don’t you guys?).
I suppose this is sort of full circle. Like every other thirty-something, the first computer I ever used was an Apple II (Apple ][, whatever). My parents had one of the first Macintosh’s (back when they were called Macintosh and not just Mac), which like my iMac was a PC-in-a-monitor.
Everything old is new again.