New Machine: What to install first?

July 2, 2009 — jaysonrowe

Last year, I published a list of my “Must Have Windows Applications” and I’ll admit, I hit it up when I got my new notebook this week to remind myself of what I needed to download and install. I’m taking a new philosophy with this Notebook: I’m only going to install what I know I need, and what I know I’ll use on a regular basis. If I find I need something I’ll install it then, and only then. I’m going to try to keep this machine as lean and clean as possible. My ultimate goal is to be able to an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 (final) later this year. This should go well from the reports I’ve seen of folks upgrading x64 Vista systems to the x64 Release Candidate of Windows 7, and I’m sure the leaner the machine, the better.

Some of my changes?

First off, I’ve opted not to install Office. I find I rarely use any of the MS Office applications at home, and I haven’t installed Open Office either – I’m actually going to try to stick with using Google Docs once the need arises.

Secondly, I’ve pretty much given up on learning a hard-core programming language (like C#) right now. I simply have to many other things on my plate, and I don’t have the time to devote too it. I did install Microsoft’s new Small Basic as I have had some great fun with it. Reminds me of being a kid hacking around in QBASIC in DOS :-)

I’ve also changed some of my preferences in other tools as you will see below – so here is my current list of “what I install” first off when setting up a new machine:

7zip – Still my favorite archiving application

AVG Free – Still my favorite Anti-Virus solution. It has a small memory footprint and has proven effective and reliable for me.

Google Chrome – Chrome has quickly become my default browser of choice.

Mozilla Firefox – Although Chrome has become my favorite browser, I still (and probably always will) keep Firefox installed.

Filezilla – Great FTP client that has always served me well.

Dropbox – My friend and co-worker Chris Reeder turned me onto Dropbox and I can’t thank him enough! Be sure to check it out for a cheap/free online backup/sync tool!

Hulu Desktop – Who needs TV when you have Hulu? The web version was great, Hulu Desktop takes Hulu into an entirely different dimension – it’s awesome!

iTunes – I don’t have an iPod (yet), and I still manage/play my .mp3 files with WMP, but I use iTunes to listen to live on-line radio streams & podcasts.

Paint.NET – Has all the image editing tools I need.

RoyalTS – Favorite RDP manager (note, you need the older version to have more than 12 connections)

Pidgin – It’s an IM client…it works.

TweetDeck – My new favorite Twitter client, now that I can create groups and sync them across multiple PC’s.

VirtualBox – I think VirtualBox has passed VMware in speed, features, and functionality – best of all? It’s Free!

VLC – Handles all of those media files that won’t open in anything else!

Vista Codec Pack and x64 Additions – Just extra codecs for WMP.

Windows Live Writer – Best blogging editor ever created – hands down!

Notepad2 (or this improved version to be exact) – I use the improved version – it is available as a native x64 application and has an installer which “replaces” Windows Notepad with Notepad2.

Open Command Prompt Shell Extension – I found this on the same site as the improved Notepad2 – adds a useful contextual menu item to open a command prompt in whatever folder you are browsing in Windows Explorer. I’ve found this little utility to be endlessly useful.

So there you have it, my updated list of awesomely useful tools, utilities and applications. What are your favorites?

Posted in Computing. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

After the Honeymoon was over…

June 29, 2009 — jaysonrowe

I just realized I hadn’t posted here about the saga of my iMac ownership…

Lets just say that the relationship was short lived. First, the Mac was misrepresented by the eBay seller who sold it to me. I do not think it was his intentions to misrepresent the Mac, I think he was just ignorant to the different models. Let me clarify.

What I thought I was bidding on when I won the auction:

2008 model Core2Duo, 2GB RAM 250GB HDD

What I actually got:

Early 2006 model CoreDuo, 2GB RAM 250GB HDD

The biggest difference? Well, the Core2Duo is up to 20%% faster than the CoreDuo clock for clock. Also, the Core2Duo is 64-bit whereas the CoreDuo is 32-bit. That’s a pretty important “2″.

The Early 2006 iMac (due to a very poor choice in chipset) is limited to 2GB of RAM maximum.

Initially, I was willing to just accept that I had made a less than ideal purchase, and live with it since I wanted a Mac so badly, but ultimately, I had to part ways. I was bummed out ( a little), but I had a Mac!

The machine ran well under Tiger, but less and less software is supporting Tiger – under Leopard, after some usage, I started seeing the “Beach Ball” pretty regularly. For those who aren’t Mac Savvy, the “Beach Ball” is the multi-colored spinning “Busy Cursor”. VMware Fusion was practically unusable for me – doing anything in a Virtual Machine was a slow and painful task, in fact, just simply having Mail, Firefox (or Safari), a Twitter Client, an IRC client and a media player open all at the same time would slowly bring the machine to it’s knees. It was even slow to scroll through graphically intense web pages (ok – even Google Reader was *slow*).

I’ve always had “snappy” PC’s, and I hadn’t experienced using a computer that slow in a very long time, and I just couldn’t take it any longer – even if it was a Mac. I knew I could hit up NewEgg and for less than $300 build a machine that was at least 4x as fast as that Mac I just paid over $600 for! I made a bad purchase, and I had to either live with it, or sell it while I could still get out of it what I had in it.

Sadly, I listed it back on eBay, and I was lucky enough to find a buyer, and ended up making a whopping $10 profit, so I’m happy :-) As slow as it was, and as aggravated as I was getting with it, I was still sad to box it up and send it on it’s way.

But now what?

I liked having the “Quad Core Monster” downstairs. It was more convinent – for one thing, it gave Mom a decent machine to use - she’d always been stuck with my old machines – she’s always making comments about how fast that computer is, and how she actually enjoys using it, so I didn’t want to take that away from her. Should I build another machine? One thing I liked about the iMac was that it ran cool, and ran quiet. I didn’t have a hulking tower that sounded like a vacuum sitting next too me – downstairs is generally 10 degree’s cooler, and I can keep the fans in the Antec 900 all on low and the “Quad” still runs cooler than it ran up here with all 5 fans spinning away on “high”. I like it where it’s at now – downstairs, a “catch-all” family PC – it holds my music, our family pictures and our important data on a secure RAID-1 – also it serves as a VMware Host for times I want to fire off some VM’s andplay around with Linux and it’s always just an RDP session or a trip to the Dining Room away.

I got creative with some “wishlists” on NewEgg- I toyed around with stuff I’d never considered before – small form factor stuff, MiniITX motherboards, MicroATX boards, low voltage CPU’s – Video cards that didn’t require 6-pin power connectors of their own. I was even researching the power consumption of various hard drives. I wanted to create something that would be fast, but also cool and quiet. The down-side was I didn’t want to go over the $650 I had in PayPal after re-selling the iMac, and I was also budgeting for a 2nd monitor, because I’d grown to really love having dual-displays here at home since having the iMac.

Then it hit me – why not see what I could get in a Notebook PC! I did some looking around, and I was amazed at what I could get in that price range. I tossed some options around, and ultimately wound up purchasing a nice Lenovo from NewEgg…2.2GHz Core2Duo, 64-bit Vista Home Premium, 4GB of RAM, 250GB HDD, 15.4″ LED lit screen, DL-DVD Burner, HDMI, the thing even (supposedly) has a built-in 4.1 sound system with a “sub-woofer” (yes the picture on NewEgg shows a “speaker” on the bottom that is the “sub”). It even has face recognition log-in. All for $549+Free Shipping (on sale from $749). That’s an unbelievable deal in my opinion, and should serve me well for a long time. I know Lenovo makes quality notebooks, and they will hold up for the long haul.

This will be the first time I will have used a notebook as my main “go-to” machine, but I’m looking forward to the flexibility it should give me – I can sit here at my desk and hang my 22″ LCD off of it for a nice dual monitor setup or I can “grab it and go” if I want to sit out back in the shade, or downstairs while watching TV – I can just take it with me.

I’m really looking forward too it. I feel  like I’m waiting on Santa Claus :-)

P.S. Look at the specs of that Lenovo (which is a quality notebook in build quality) and then hit up Apple’s web site for comparison and then try to tell me there is no such thing as an “Apple Tax”. You can’t even buy a bare bones Apple Mini for less than $600 (ok, so it’s $1 less), and the least expensive notebook is the $999 “white” Macbook, and that’s with a smaller screen, a (slightly) slower CPU, half the RAM and 90GB less hard drive space.

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QOTD: Mac Users, Where do you dock your Dock?

June 13, 2009 — jaysonrowe

Both with my recent iMac acquisition, and my brief previous usage of a MacBook Pro, I’m still “getting to know” the Mac OS X Dock.

It’s an odd little creature. Being a “switcher” (coming from Windows and Linux) it’s taking some getting used to. Although I was a past Mac user, those days were before OS X, and we didn’t have a dock back then – just the “Control Strip” starting with System 7.5 (if I recall correctly).

So far, I’ve come to my first conclusion – I can’t stand the magnification animation, so that *has* to be turned off regardless, but I’ve toyed with positions a little. Initially, back when I was using the MacBook Pro (which only had 1440×900 resolution), I had it hidden on the bottom, but on my iMac, I have 3360×1050 pixels to work with, so I like having it visible. Although I use the Google Quick Search Box to launch a lot of my applications now, I still like seeing the dock, and I like having a lot of my programs there; it makes it easy to see what’s running, and allows me to drop files (which could be opened with several different applications) onto the icon of the application I specifically want it to open with.

After lots of moving it around from the bottom and side to side, I’ve settled on having it along the right hand side of my screen. Why? First it kind of mimics the old Mac OS in that the Finder is at the top and the trash is in the lower right hand corner (where it’s supposed to be). Also, my iMac’s display is my “primary” display (which has my Menu bar), and it’s my “right hand” display – I have my secondary 22″ display off to the left, and if I put my dock all the way to the left hand side of that screen, it really does seem “out in left field”. I definitely wanted my dock sharing the same screen as my menu bar.

A “geeky” side-perk of having the dock on the right is it reminds me (slightly) of OpenStep/NeXTSTEP a little :-)

The side orientation also pleases me because it gets rid of the silly 3D “Leopard Dock” (which looks like it will be staying w/ Snow Leopard), and it seems to make better use of pixels on a wide-screen display.

So, there you have it, I’m one of those werido’s that puts my dock on the side of the screen. My question to you is: Where do *you* dock your Dock?

Update: So, I’ve discovered that the dock is like one of those 6-way adjustable chairs in a car – once you move it, you can’t get it right. I’m actually back to the bottom now. I liked the right-side, but it tended to both “run into” applications, as well as cover up new desktop items as they are created (temp files I save there and/or mounted disks), which was highly annoying…

I did discover that the choice of desktop background makes a huge difference with how the (3D) dock appears, so I’m just using one of the Apple supplied backgrounds instead of my own – heck, I never hardly ever see my desktop anyway…Speaking of backgrounds, if you are looking on a nice background that will not “tire” on you, check out some of the “Solid Colors”…like I said, you hardly ever see your desktop background anyway (if you are actually getting anything done, that is  :-) )

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Simon Royal

June 12, 2009 — jaysonrowe

Simon gave me a shout-out on his blog, so I decided to return the favor. I’ve got a draft saved of a post I’ve written discussing all of the sites I’ve come across that have helped me in my Mac switch, and his site is included there as well (once I get around to cleaning it up and getting it published).

Similar to what Simon said about me – he seems to share similar interest and remains objective when discussing different computing platforms and technologies, and has a genuine interest in computing as I do – that’s what makes his blog an enjoyable read for me (besides the Mac info I picked up there).

Anyway – thanks for the link Simon, and back at ya!

Check out Simon’s site here!

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Why must Vista use all of my RAM?!?

June 2, 2009 — jaysonrowe

It’s really annoying Vista, the way you hog all of my RAM. I’m not doing anything particularly taxing at the moment – the largest application I have open is MS Excel, so why are you using over 70% of my RAM?!?

I wish I could talk to software, and just ask it a question like above. I can’t figure it out. I’ve tweaked like there is no tomorrow, and Vista is just a hog – plain and simple.

This isn’t due to SuperFetch either, as I have that disabled (along with 15 or so other services).

My running applications?

  • RoyalTS
  • 3 cmd.exe windows
  • Citrix XenCenter
  • Password Corral
  • Outlook
  • Google Chrome (4 Windows, with perhaps 15 tabs total)
  • Pidgin
  • Notepad2
  • Excel
  • TweetDeck

And here is the result:

ram_vista

It makes me sad. I really wish I could understand why Vista does this, when I could run a similar load on XP, 7, any Linux distro or my Mac running Leopard and not see anywhere near the memory usage, or the sluggishness of Vista. That being said, contrary to what others may say, Vista is rock solid stable for me – it might get sluggish and it might want more RAM than it needs, but at least it isn’t crash-happy.

I feel better now that I took this brief moment to vent – now back to your regularly scheduled program :-)

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Interesting Stop-Smoking Plan

June 1, 2009 — jaysonrowe

Last night I was chatting with a friend who recently (and successfully) stopped smoking, and they had an interesting plan that they followed; at least compared to things *I’ve* tried before, and I think I’m going to give it a shot.

For me at least, I know it’s not smart to try and just “Cold Turkey” quit – just cut them off. That will never work, and I’ll cave before 1 day is over with – I have to have a plan going in!

On previous attempts, I’ve always cut out “unnecessary” cigarettes, and kept “key” cigarettes.

For me key cigarettes are:

  • In the morning before work
  • In the Car on the way to work
  • 10 AM at work
  • Lunch
  • 3 PM at work
  • In the car on the way home from work
  • After Supper
  • Before bed.

Any additional cigarettes I’ve always felt were the “habit” cigarettes – something I did simply to “do something” with my hands/mouth. However my friend suggested giving up one “necessary” cigarette a day – perhaps every two days starting with the earliest one and ending with the latest one.

Let’s try it!

Today, I haven’t smoked a cigarette yet – but I will smoke one in the car on the way to work. I’ve just given up a “key” cigarette, and I can smoke as much as I want the rest of the day. Tomorrow, I won’t smoke in the morning before leaving for work or in the car on the way to work, the next day my first cigarette will be at lunch, and so on…

Let’s see how this goes!

Wish me luck! (It worked for my friend).

Posted in General, Personal. 3 Comments »

(Just Like) Starting Over

May 31, 2009 — jaysonrowe

No, not the John Lennon song…but I do have to start something over.

My diet. My quest to quit smoking. My “lifestyle change” changed itself back.

My ‘New Years Resolution’ this year was not to make a New Years Resolution, but to set some goals for myself. One of those goals was to get down to a (more) healthy weight, and to start eating a more “Heart Healthy” diet low in Fat, Sodium and Cholesterol. The other was to quit smoking.

In regards to the diet, I did really good – for about 5 months (I actually started in December). When did I start falling off of the wagon? Well, it’s kinda hard to put a date on it, but I took a vacation from work back in April, and I’m not sure that’s when I fell off of the wagon, but I’m pretty sure that’s when all four wheels of the wagon ran me over! It seemed that every day we went into town to do something, and while there, ate lunch out – and then being tired in the evening we would get “sloppy” for supper – you know – fix something quick and simple. 

It all started innocently enough – Hot Dogs w/ Chili for supper one night, and then some Chicken Nuggets and Fries (at least we fixed both of those in the oven). Finally my Mom talked me into have Fried Chicken one night (she was really growing tired of all the “George Forman Grilled” food) and it was all over but the crying! It wasn’t too long after that I started getting sloppy with my lunches. It seems my only (still) daily “healthy” meal was breakfast – either having a Special K meal bar or some Yogurt and Juice. My lunchtime fare had quickly morphed from low-fat Turkey on whole wheat to Subway, and then Wendy’s and Burger King “Grilled” chicken sandwiches and finally I realized I was simply just eating the way I used to.

Not only that, but my walking routine started to slip, and all of this coupled with a ton of extra stress that dumped itself into my life over the past 3-4 weeks and it’s all gone downhill very quickly.

It shows too. I’ve gained all but 5 pounds of what I lost back. I feel just as bad as I did when I started all of this – I feel fat, tired, bloated and just plain BLAH!

So, I mark tomorrow, June 1 2009 as National “Start Over” day. Tomorrow I start my diet again, and I start (seriously) trying to quit smoking again. 

Part of the “added stress” in my life over the past few weeks was my Mom’s health. She has a few things going on, but a biggie for me was that she was diagnosed with Emphysema. Luckily, it isn’t “severe” at least at this point, so no Oxygen tank or anything like that – she does get short of breath on long walks though. That hit me pretty hard, especially since I was so proud of the fact that she quit smoking over a year ago. She smoked for 45 years and quit cold turkey, so I think I can do it – I HAVE to do it.

So, if you see me tomorrow, wish me luck. If I don’t seem “cheerful” don’t take it personally. I’m probably hungry, and I’m sure I want to smoke :-)

Posted in General, Personal. Tags: . 1 Comment »

I’m a Mac AND a PC

May 25, 2009 — jaysonrowe

As you may know already, I recently purchased an iMac. It arrived this past Thursday and I’ve been waiting to post about my experiences until I had lived with my new friend for a few days.

I’m no stranger to the Macintosh – I was once a “die-hard Mac guy” – in fact, during my college days, I was a downright rabid ”fanboy”. That was, until I discovered two things – first the First Person Shooter, “Counter-Strike”, and secondly Linux. This is, however the first Mac I’ve had as a “main system”  in – I guess, 8 or 9 years now, and is the first Mac I’ve owned that was faster than a G3! I do still have my old PowerMac 7200/120 in the closet – I created some awesome music on that guy, and I can’t bear to let him go – there are a lot of memories in that plain beige desktop!

A while back, I was loaned a MacBook Pro from my job which I used to get a taste of what the Mac has become in the last 10 years or so, and I really “dug it”. It was as if the best of two worlds were merged for me – the power of UNIX, with the commercial application support of a truly mainstream Operating System. I was able to use that system for about 3 months (although as a secondary system) and I really liked it – it sparked an interest in both the Mac OS as well as Apple Hardware again.

At home, on a couple of different systems, I toyed around with doing “Hackintosh” installs – I really liked the OS, and I got it working pretty well on two different boxes, at two different times, but it never really “felt” stable too me. It always felt kinda like a house of cards in a hurricane – I knew it was a matter of time before something (probably an update) would send the whole thing crashing down around me. It just never “felt right” – it wasn’t a “real mac”. It was like having a Jetta and pretending I had an Audi.

My biggest problem was I had just built a new PC – two in fact (I wasn’t satisfied with my initial AMD based build and sold it) and also had another very decent PC in the house. So, as you may have read in a previous post, I took the two systems, intertwined some of the parts and came up with both a nicely sellable Core2Duo system which hit eBay, and a nicely equipped Core2Quad which stayed here as the “downstairs” family PC (and my CS & CS:Source box).

So much for the backstory – on to the new family member!

Once I decided I wanted to get a Mac it was a very difficult decision deciding what I wanted to get. First, I didn’t have much more than $700 I would be able to spend, and I wanted to get the most performance and “best experience” I could buy for that amount of money. I considered two options - either a used Intel iMac or a new Intel Mini. I didn’t even consider a used, refurbished or clearance Mini since I most definitely did NOT want Intel GMA graphics. There were two things I wasn’t crazy about in the Mini – first was the use of a notebook hard drive. Even the 7,200RPM notebook hard drives aren’t nearly as speedy as their desktop counter-parts (to make matters worse the Mini’s ship w/ 5,400RPM drives), and secondly even though the “new” Mini’s support Nvidia graphics, it’s a low-end chip that still shares system RAM…a big no-no in my book. Even with those shortcomings, it appeared that I was going to end up with the Mini. All of the Intel 20″+ iMac’s I came across were above my spending limit. 

(Note: The resell value of Mac’s have always amazed me – 7 year old G4 PowerMac systems are still going on eBay for the cost of a new entry – mid level Dell!)

In a recent post I blogged about my frustration with Paypal, and how I’ve never bought into the “good things come to those who wait”, yet this time it came true for me. One the very day all of my funds were secured, I went to eBay – into the “Apple Desktops” category and sorted by “ending soonest” and I came across my new friend. It’s previous owner obviously wasn’t a “Mac Guy” or better yet, probably not a “computer guy” of any sort. He had a very confusing listing, and even had this machine listed with the G5 iMacs, and bidding hadn’t really shot up on it into the range of other similar systems. After reading through some answers he’d posted to other bidder’s questions, I determined that this machine would probably work for me, but I had to act quick – the auction ended in 3 minutes…in a brief moment of insanity, and the knowledge that I could re-list it with a sane product description and recoup my funds if needed, I bid $3 higher than the current bid, and told myself I wouldn’t bid any further – I would either win it, or I’d buy the Mini from Apple. Well, sure enough, I won it, and I’m happy with what I got. It’s the “last of the white iMacs” a C2D 2.0 with 2GB of RAM, a 250GB HDD, SuperDrive and an ATI x1600 Graphics Chip. I also invested a small amount into a MiniDVI to DVI adapter which allows me to use my 22″ Hannspree LCD as a secondary monitor in Extended desktop – I’m loving having 3360×1050 resolution at my disposal as both my “old” 22″ and the 20″ iMac display both run at 1680×1050.

First impressions? Well I love it! It’s not “cutting-edge” but is more machine than I “need” at the moment – it’s running very well, even using VMWare Fusion to virutalize an XP and Ubuntu install. It “feels” much better than either of the “Hackintosh” systems I’d set up – and boots very fast (EFI is so much better than a BIOS)…not to mention Sleep/Resume works so much better on a Mac than any PC I’ve ever used. The great thing is – buying used, I’ll lose even less resell value, and I’m 100% confident I can use this system for at least 2 years, and still sell it for more than I just sold an 1 year-old PC for on eBay, and by then I’m sure many great things like SSD’s will not only be standard but WAY down in price, and who knows what the Mac line-up would look like! Even though this system is already a year and a half old, there really isn’t anything (outside of the Mac Pro Xeon powerhouse) on Apple.com that out-specs this guy in a way that it would provide a drastically different computing experience, which makes me feel a huge amount of added value by purchasing a “previously loved” Mac.

Expect lots more blog-posts to come as I learn my way around better – I’m loving lots of the features of Leopard, specifically TimeMachine, so I see a blog post on that in my future for sure!

So, although according to the commercials, you’re either a Mac or a PC, I can say I’m both – I’m a Mac AND a PC depending on where I’m sitting at the moment! :-)

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An IT Pro’s Greatest Challenge:

May 19, 2009 — jaysonrowe

As a working IT pro, I get presented with challenges great and small on a daily basis. Most often these challenges either involve quickly learning a new product or technology, or meeting project and/or product deadlines.

These are the absolute challenges that many would expect an IT professional to meet each day, but often both ourselves (as IT Pros) and our users forget that the IT pro’s biggest challenge is him or herself. In other words, I am my biggest challenge.

Why is that?

It’s simple – I’m an IT guy, and my users are not. This is a simple fact of reality that I think many IT personnel fail to realize. In order to be a truly successful IT Pro, you have to not only be able to understand your user, but you have to present information to your users in such a way that they understand what you are saying. You also have to present new technology to them in such a way that it is not intimidating, and easy to understand.

I struggle with this daily.

I’m a very technical guy – I embrace technology. It’s part of my genetic makeup – I was simply wired at birth to do this kind of work – it’s beyond a career for me, it’s a passion, it’s a hobby, it’s a love. When computers and technology are so much a part of your life, it’s often very hard to view C&T as mere “tools” the way one of my users would. 

For example – lets say Microsoft releases a new version of Word. I’m digging in looking at/for new features. What’s different? What’s new? Does it use less memory? More memory?!? Does it now support multi-threading to make better use of my multi-core CPU?

These are all questions that are lost on my users – they see a tool to type and print documents – and that’s seriously all it is too them. They are most likely annoyed by the new version becuase Microsoft inadvertantly moved or removed their favorite and/or most useful icon in the program.

How do I start thinking this way?

I need to get better at this; I want to create a seamless and awesome computing experience for my users. I want to give them new technology that I don’t have to accompany with a 700 word instructional document. I want it to simply work, and not break. I want them to forget that IT is downstairs, and focus on their jobs. They shouldn’t have to take time out of thier day to put in a Service Request Ticket, nor deal with Technology that isn’t working correctly.

If it’s not intuative to them, it’s broken. If it doesn’t work in the way they expect it to work, it’s broken.

I have to be able to think like a user, and not an IT Pro.

This is my new personal goal moving forward.

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I’ll soon be a Mac user again…

May 16, 2009 — jaysonrowe

As you saw from my last post where I was fighting with eBay and PayPal, I sold off a bunch of unneeded, and unused computers and computer equipment from around my house. I’m very proud of being able to “let go” of some of this stuff (I tend to be a pack-rat). I honestly came to a realization that no, I won’t ever need that old Socket A CPU I’ve been hanging onto for 5 years ;-)

I also made two realizations/decisions about my personal computer here. First, I overbuilt – seriously. I let myself get sucked into an “addiction” I’d broken many years ago – “Benchmark Mania”. I started reading sites such as Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech and ExtremeTech again, and reading about 3DMark scores, and Cinebench Scores, and HDTach scores, and this score, and that score and every little score score…

It really is a vicsious cycle, and it does become addicting (and expensive)…for those who need something to relate too, it’s like hot-rodding cars – there is always something faster, and it’s impossible to keep up.

What I wound up with was a hulking, power-hungry (power-sucking) Overclocked Quad-Core monster with more RAM and more HDD space that I would ever come close to tapping into, unless I was running a benchmark. For day to day tasks, it was really no different, or no faster than the last 3 computers I’ve built – honestly.

Also, I decided that once and for all, I want to be a Mac user again. Messing around with my Hackintosh install of Leopard was the most “fun” I’d had with a computer in ages. Yes, part of it was the “hacking” part of it – you know, making something workt that by all accounts shouldn’t work. But part of it was realizing how much I love the MacOS, and how much better it is at doing what I want to do than either Windows, or any of the many Linux distributions out there. I’m really ready for some simplicity. I also want to get back into doing Music on my Computer again – Composing, Recording and MIDI Sequencing, and I still (and always will) feel that nothing is a better platform for a creative mind than a Macintosh. Also, for a few months I had a chance to use a MacBook Pro at work, and although it wound up going on to someone else, I really developed a love for that little machine (as much as you could love a computer), and it cemented the fact that even after all of these years away, I really *was* a “Mac Guy”, and I missed having one.

So, here is what I did.

First, I shuffled some parts around between my PC (I had just built) and the “Downstairs PC” which was my old PC and between the two built a more “sensible” downstairs PC using the awesome Antec 900 case, Q6600 and Gigabyte motherboard that was in my “new” PC.

I ditched the stupidest purchase I’d ever made – the WD VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM drive. That was the biggest waste of money in the PC, because in reality it made very little difference outside of benchmarks (due to newer OSes doing such a great job with caching), although it *did* boot up a few seconds faster (I rarely reboot anyway – just suspend/resume). The 10K drive, even after being used for several months came just dollars shy of what I paid on NewEgg brand new (eBay amazes me sometimes).

For the “Downstairs PC” I planned to just run Windows XP (32-bit) on the downstairs PC (at least for now), so I left just 4GB of RAM in it (it sees 3.5GB), and about 750GB of HDD Space. I also backed off the overclock, and turned on EIST and C1E to throttle the CPU down when not under heavy load.

That left me with a nice Dual-core, Core2Duo based PC w/ 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD to list on eBay. That was the bulk of my “Mac Money” right there, and I was pleased with what it brought, and I enjoyed talking with the buyer and helping them set up Ubuntu on it!

Also, I “stripped and parted” my other 4 old computers I had up here, and sold the components separately – I’m pretty sure I made more money that way, and components are easier and cheaper to ship than whole PC’s (although it made for more auctions to keep up with). The only parts I did not sell were the Motherboards (simply in case a friend with an older PC has a Mobo die, and “older socket” Mobo’s are hard to find), and the PSU’s – you never know when you’ll need a good Power Supply.

After all of this is said and done, and my new iMac is delivered next week, this will be the computing make-up of my home network:

Upstairs in my bedroom/man-cave I’ll have my new 20″ iMac (which will also be running my left-over 22″ LCD in Extended Desktop mode, which means I’ll have a whopping 3360×1050 pixels of screen-space).

Mom is keeping her old P4 in her room – it only gets booted up for about 30-mins maybe twice a week.

Downstairs is a nice Quad core PC w/ a decent vid card running XP Pro for Mom to use during the day, and for me to “Game” on when I feel like a few rounds of Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike:Source. I fully expect this “Downstairs PC” to last for many years w/o any significant upgrades, although I will probably drop some more RAM in it and upgrade it to Windows 7 at some point – after I convince Mom that it really is better than XP :-)

The best part – even after buing the iMac (it’s already been paid for and on the way, along w/ the MiniDVI to DVI adapter to hook up my 22″), I ended up with $125 more in my Bank Account than I started with.

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