(no subject)
Nov. 8th, 2010 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyOk, it's getting time to retire the old G4 PowerBook. As much as I love it, and OSX, the poor thing is starting to get up in age. At over 7 years old, it's already on its 2nd display, motherboard, and hard drive (the two larger items replaced under warranty, yay). It will shutdown from overheating, and if it's been off long enough in the cold, it won't start up right the first couple times. It can still handle mp3s and older xvid avi files, but not mkv. Streaming video sites are risky, since they will max out the processor and cause it to overheat, and it doesn't take as much to do that anymore.
Now I have an Acer laptop. What's under the hood? It has an i7 processor, 4GB of memory with another 1GB for video, 500GB hard drive, Blu-ray drive, and an LED-backlit display. Price was $900.
I was thinking about getting another Apple product, but after they went to Intel chips, they lost their hook, and I couldn't really justify the added expense just for OSX. Also, the ability to do memory and hard drive upgrades should not require brain surgery. When most makers have offerings that have their own access panels for that sort of thing, the newest MacBooks are sealed units. On my first PowerBook? I could swap out the memory, processor, and hard drive from flipping up the keyboard. The newer PB, I could just swap out the memory. Hard drive swap on that involved taking out half a dozen screws from the bottom, but it was still possible. As such, Apple's sealed-unit policy and my DIY mentality will have to go separate ways.
I'm still getting used to it, such as with the off-center trackpad and typing, and the massive data importing hasn't even started.
One thing I needed to do was put a new desktop background on. Then all the secondary stuff like installing programs was next.
Another thing I needed to do was fix the partitions. Being a pre-installed OS, they set aside about 14GB for a recovery partition (that I'll never need unless my Windows7 installers magically vanish), and let the OS hog the entire rest of the drive. It needed tweaking. I gave Windows7 80GB, which in itself is waaaaay more than enough. It'll keep all the things that save to C: by default happy. I was sorely tempted to just wipe it from the start and re-install it My Way, but I'll see how it goes as-is. Maybe I'll just do it proper when it comes time to put a 1TB in it.
What will become of the PowerBook? I'll keep it, for various nefarious purposes. There's also the matter of the dozen external hard drives that are formatted in HFS+, making them tied to the PowerBook, but I have ways around that. MacDrive lives up to the hype.
So yeah, that's how it turned out.
Now I have an Acer laptop. What's under the hood? It has an i7 processor, 4GB of memory with another 1GB for video, 500GB hard drive, Blu-ray drive, and an LED-backlit display. Price was $900.
I was thinking about getting another Apple product, but after they went to Intel chips, they lost their hook, and I couldn't really justify the added expense just for OSX. Also, the ability to do memory and hard drive upgrades should not require brain surgery. When most makers have offerings that have their own access panels for that sort of thing, the newest MacBooks are sealed units. On my first PowerBook? I could swap out the memory, processor, and hard drive from flipping up the keyboard. The newer PB, I could just swap out the memory. Hard drive swap on that involved taking out half a dozen screws from the bottom, but it was still possible. As such, Apple's sealed-unit policy and my DIY mentality will have to go separate ways.
I'm still getting used to it, such as with the off-center trackpad and typing, and the massive data importing hasn't even started.
One thing I needed to do was put a new desktop background on. Then all the secondary stuff like installing programs was next.
Another thing I needed to do was fix the partitions. Being a pre-installed OS, they set aside about 14GB for a recovery partition (that I'll never need unless my Windows7 installers magically vanish), and let the OS hog the entire rest of the drive. It needed tweaking. I gave Windows7 80GB, which in itself is waaaaay more than enough. It'll keep all the things that save to C: by default happy. I was sorely tempted to just wipe it from the start and re-install it My Way, but I'll see how it goes as-is. Maybe I'll just do it proper when it comes time to put a 1TB in it.
What will become of the PowerBook? I'll keep it, for various nefarious purposes. There's also the matter of the dozen external hard drives that are formatted in HFS+, making them tied to the PowerBook, but I have ways around that. MacDrive lives up to the hype.
So yeah, that's how it turned out.
