New Gear: Apple Power Mac G5 Quad

Yeah, I’m an idiot. I bought bigger gear. Story of my life. So sue me! 🙂 (Poor Darla!)

Last night, I finally finished the chess moves that would allow me to put a dream workstation at my desk: a PowerMac G5 Quad. Two dual-core 2.5Ghz G5 processors are steaming along inside the brushed aluminum case, and are making merry inside my creative world. To that, I added an Apple 20″ Widescreen Cinema Display — the same size and resolution as my iMac that is now redundant.

Last night, Sio powered the thing up for its first light, and I began the process of moving my iMac’s brains into the shiny new canvas of the PowerMac. That process was incredibly easy — the migration path involves connecting the two boxes via firewire, and it takes care of the rest. About 3.5 hours later, the PowerMac was mine. The only thing I’ve noticed that wasn’t quite right was my hostfile, which was easy to change. A very impressive migration! And with this machine, I can keep all the photos and music on the internal SATA drive, rather than a firewire attached PATA drive. Verra nice.

Frankly, with the new monitor on the desk, my workspace seems less cluttered — something Beck also noticed. It’s nice, and allows me to have a little more elbow room on the glass desktop. I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon re-cabling and trying to clean up my office. Both are daunting tasks, but I’m making headway, and expect to be in good shape later in the week.

So, it’s faster, easier photoprocessing and overall snappy performance for me. I can’t wait to try JAlbum with this rig. The creator of JAlbum has created a multi-processor aware version, so I expect that building the photo part of the site will be much less painless!