Friday, July 16, 2004
A bit quiet... but I had to write today because my brand-spanking new computer arrived! I got a Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz (with 1GB of RAM and a 160GB HD) and my mom, dad and sister each got iBooks (14" for my parents and 12" for my sister). It's awesome. I'll have pics and stuff up later, but... wow. Tons of cool things here... the coolest of which was right at the beginning: System Transfer. When your new Mac boots up, it asks if you have an old Mac running at least Mac OS X 10.1 with a FireWire port. If so, you have the option of transferring all your old data to your new computer. Just hook up the FireWire cable between the two, start up the old one while holding down "T" on the keyboard, and it'll transfer across everything and anything you want. And it doesn't just transfer files... it transfers applications and settings. So basically, when it was done (and though it's supposed to be fairly quick, when you have 65GB to transfer like I did it can take an hour or so...) my computer looked EXACTLY like the old one. Safari is right there on top of my Dock which is on the left side at the exact position and size I like. All my bookmarks, iTunes, buddies in Fire, mail in Entourage... perfect.
There are a few minor niggles right now though. Firstly, though it and my monitor both support DVI, I don't have any DVI cables anywhere so I had to use the included VGA -> DVI cable. Which is fine. The other thing is more annoying... well, annoying and nice at the same time. See, the old Power Mac G4 (and the current iMac) both use a special minijack for speakers that is basically tailored towards Apple's own Pro Speakers, which in turn work on those machines only. Now, I thought the G5 would be the same. But I was wrong -- the G5 includes regular speaker jacks AND an optical jack! This is great, except... I don't have any regular speakers. I just have my old Power Mac G4 minijack speakers. And now they're a bit useless. In fairness, there is an adapter available from peerless peripheral maker Griffin, but since the adapter ties up a FireWire port and COSTS MONEY it's probably best if I just buy better speakers or something.
Still, I'm not too fussed just now. I'm loving this! Can't wait to do some video editing on this rig...
Posted at 5:43 AM
