I also brought my server into my room and have started using it for TV and such. I realized that it was being used almost exclusively for storage and since it had a lot more power than that I wanted to use it for something else. That combined with my problem with a few games not liking dual-monitors made me recommission it as a Debian box which is sitting in my room now. Whenever I’m playing games or other things on my desktop I use that box for TV. Apart from that it still serves the exact same purpose as before, but it’s also easier to maintain with Debian.

But because I only had one cable coming into my room my desktop had get connectivity through my server. This was a real pain in the ass because it meant that nothing on the rest of the network (wireless, which means my laptop) could connect to my desktop anymore and I had to move everything through the server if I needed it. I also needed to have the server on if I wanted a connection on my desktop. This really wasn’t working for me so I dropped some cash earlier this week for a nice gigabit 8 port switch, couple of cat6 and I hooked everything up faster than before.

Seven years old and it was still kicking til the end. As much as a 2Ghz, gig of RAM, 128mb video card might seem nice, that old mac was perfectly fine for what it needed to do, and it ran very smoothly on linux.

I tell everyone who’s not using their computer for gaming, get the cheapest thing you can, because that’s all people have “needed” for years now. Vista does require a decent video card and probably 2 gigs of RAM and a dual core processor to run with all the features turned up but then again, no one needs Vista either. Windows 2000 is FINE for your business and XP is all your home users needs.

The unexpected death has left me without a mobile computer though, which means back to pen and paper for my notes. That’s not so much fun but I barely take notes anyway.

So if anyone has a 4 year old laptop, I’d gladly take it off of your hands.

Except there is something different about my mac. It can’t watch those videos. It’s too damned slow. It’s a 7 year old ibook running a G3. It can’t watch youtube video. It has troubles with word processing at times. Which is why I’m only using TextEdit.

Single core, PowerPC, 500MHz. 320MB of RAM, 10 gig hard drive running 10.3. Slowly. At best. But it runs. And it was cheap. And it’s a laptop.

In CS 136 today the prof was looking for someone with a PPC mac and I was the only person to have one. At all. And I know like 4 people with macs myself.

It takes over a minute, and it has been timed, to load the app we do our programming in. That’s quite the commitment just to try out a simple line of code. The temptation would be to keep it running at all times but if I keep it open all the time everything else will be even slower. Even the app to see how much memory and CPU I’m using takes more CPU time than it’s worth. 20-40% just monitoring itself.

At least I won’t get viruses right? right? Well since after typing in some programs and looking at the screen I can see the rest of my sentence come out well after I’m finished I’m tempted to say it has infected itself.

And it does crash, no matter what the commercials tell you. Programs randomly crash, the OS itself has frozen on me several times saying “an error has occurred, please restart your computer to fix it.” Better or worse than a BSOD? I like to be able to debug my problems.

I think I’ll stop the mac rant right there. It’s pretty but it doesn’t live up to the ‘perfect’ machine that everyone expects. Maybe better than windows, but not perfect.

I wrote this on my mac.