|
|
||
 | London's Millennium Bridge. London, UK April 6, 2006 |
|
| Apple | Cool | Disney | Entertainment | Fitness | Geek | Microsoft | Politics | Seattle Storm | Transit | Travel | UW MBA | ||
|
« July 27 Confab | Main | Tully's: Grande Americanos ... And Free WiFi » July 28, 2006My Involuntary Intel TransitionSo my primary Mac is now powered by an Intel chip. (Dammit!) Yes, my venerable, trusty PowerBook G4 has gone to Apple for repair. The drive problem that materialized in Orlando was terminal pneumonia, rather than a passing flu, and as a result I had to drop the thing off with the resident Apple Geniuses for shipment back to the mothership. My efforts to rescue the drive with DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, and even Data Rescue came to naught – I’ve been high-sticked back to my last backup (which, fortunately, was only 96 hours or so out of synch with my live drive). Yes, I lost e-mail, Quicken records, and some digital pictures from the trip. Yes, that sucks. But it could have been much, much worse. In the interim, I’m up and running on my Intel Mac Mini. The Mini is a fine machine, but it’s feeling seriously underpowered relative to the G4. The problem is RAM: the G4 has 1,024 MB, and the Mini has just half that. Since Mac OS X needs about 256MB just for basic housekeeping and keeping the lights on, that’s left me with only a quarter-gig to use for day-to-day tasks before stuff gets paged to disk. Add in the fact that some of my apps aren’t native (like, oh, say, Mac Office) and you also need to factor in Rosetta – which isn’t exactly known as being resource-light. I can pretty much guarantee that any Intel Mac I wind up buying for myself (fingers crossed for the Core2 at WWDC) is gonna have at least 2 GB of memory in it – anything less and the machine can’t do more than about three things at the same time without running slooooooowly. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. After all, I was able to get back up and running within an hour once I’d given up on resuscitating the PowerBook. And I lost just a few days’ worth of data, not all of it (thank God for SuperDuper and cheap-ass, large hard drives). Back up, folks. Seriously. I know it’s about as sexy as flossing, but it’ll save your sanity when bad things happen. And: if you’ve sent me an e-mail between 2:46 PM on Sunday, the 16th and 10 PM (Eastern) on Thursday, the 20th and you’ve not heard anything – please re-send your message. It’s been lost. I’m off to watch the Storm kick the hell out of Detroit. Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 28, 2006 5:37 PM. Posted to Apple. CommentsPost a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)« July 27 Confab | Main | Tully's: Grande Americanos ... And Free WiFi » |