Eight
I realized today that I hadn’t made any mention of my new computer I picked up about a month ago. For the last 18 months or so I’ve been working off a little Apple Macbook laptop, plugging it into my 20″ monitor so I could have two displays, one being a nice big one. Well, I’ve envied something with a lot more power for quite some time now and I was finally able to pick it up a month ago.
Say hi to my MacPro; it has 2 Quad Core processors in it; basically that means it has 8 CPU’s to work with. Time for some geek talk. Right now I have 6GB of RAM and plan to have that up to 16GB in the next few months; it can handle 32GB! The more the merrier, right? Inside it also has 4 very easy to use Hard Drive bays and I have them all filled with a 320GB, 500GB, and 2 1TB drives. The 2 1TB drives are setup in a RAID 1 for my pictures; meaning both drives get the same information so I have a duplicate copy of all my pictures as a backup. The 500GB is my backup drive for everything else via OS X’s Time Machine. Works like magic! To top it off I’m running 2 20″ Wide Monitors (1680×1050) for a lot of screen to play with.
I’m a little bummed though, because I have yet to do anything that actually taxes the system. The fans have never sped up, nothing gets too hot and as a whole it never bogs down. To give you an idea of the power I’ll give you a Handbrake comparison. Handbrake is a really cool program that rips DVD’s into a format you can put on your iPod, PSP, or just about any media playing device. My original laptop, a 1Ghz Powerbook G4 would take about 8-10 hours to rip a 2 hour movie. That’s not very fast. My recent Macbook (2Ghz Core2Duo) would go about real time, taking 2 hours for a 2 hour movie. The new guy? Twenty minutes. I was pretty impressed with that. And the fans never sped up or kicked on; it just sits there oh so quietly.
Anyhow, this is a way too long post for such a topic. Needless to say I quite enjoy my new computer and hope to be using it for a solid 5 years. I think I can realistically expect that, don’t ya think?
hahaha you’re bummed because your computer works quickly and quietly!?! i’m jealous.