iMac the Good, Parallels the Bad, Lovesnickers the Saucy.
Been not too eventful past few weeks. Work and jazz, I got my snazzy new 2.8GHz 24" iMac yesterday. So I thought for once, fuck it, let's have a cheerful entry. Well mostly cheerful.
First impressions were... Well. Whoa. My old G5 iMac was not - to me - a slow dog. Sure, after 300 shapes and junk in Fireworks things did slow down. Sure, Camino took like 10-seconds to launch and usually ended up taking 15 seconds for a new window after I'd done some browsing. But it was fine. This thing screams ahead. Screams. Every app opens literally instantly. Starting up is super fast. I've yet to even get both cores to 50% usage. It's insane. I haven't reinstalled Illustrator or Fireworks yet, but I'm looking forward to giving them a spin on some of my larger saves and seeing how well it does.
The other big things besides just having a speedier CPU was the fact it's an intel Mac. Yes, I'm so fucking late to the party the drunk loud-mouth tart has already been under the coat pile for a few hours, the even drunker rambo has already run a car through the wall and no-one knows where all the cheese-it snacks went to.
So I opened Boot Camp, partitioned the drive - which in retrospect I should of given it more like 40-45GB, I've already used half of the 32GB - it was all really easy. I restarted with the disc in and everything went smooth. The installer restarted again and bam "Disk Error"... Hm. Well after twenty minutes of just thinking my discs were busted, I found out you're supposed to quick-format the "BOOTCAMP" partition, or else it'll still be HFS+. So I did that, everything worked fine.
Apple amazes me sometimes with their little touches. I popped the Leopard disc in, and wham. The Boot Camp installer leapt up and started doing it's business. After another restart it was done. Everything seemed to work great. Drivers for my 8800GS made the window drawing really smooth, even the volume keys on the Apple keyboard worked. Exactly like in OS X. You push one and it does the "POP!" noise and the volume overlay. I was pretty stunned at that.
Clearly, lots of effort has gone in to Boot Camp from Apple to make Windows that bit more familiar.
Later that day though, disaster struck. I let Parallels use that Boot Camp drive for it's virtual machine... All seemed fine, until I restarted and tried to install some games. "Disk full". What the fuck? I'd only used, at most, 10GB of the space. Yet it told me none was free. Turns out Parallels seemed to have buggered it all up. Don't ask me how. I don't know. In the end I had to reinstall Windows, formating the Boot Camp drive again and then re-set everything up... After that everything has been pretty okay though.
One odd problem I have though is that the sound is fucking loud. Even on the minimum setting, it's too loud for me to use headphones without thinking my head will explode. Going to try fixing that later.
Why would I go through that hassle of Boot Camp? Games. Of course it's games. I've not really played a 'modern' Windows game since '01 or something. The fact I play new games and play them well was a huge selling point. I'm so very lucky Apple upgraded the iMac just at the right time. I haven't tried many games yet. The Portal demo runs great. Could probably do with a bit more RAM, as it stutters during loading. Bioshock runs... Well, I was stunned basically. Only played 10-15 minutes of it but my jaw was open most of the time. The amount of work, attention to detail... Atmosphere... It's amazing. Can't wait to play through it.
Anyway, in short: It's all good, apart from a few Windows related hiccups. Really pleased with the purchase. Lastly, tomorrow is me and my girlfriend's first year anniversary! A whole year of her putting up with me and my toes, aren't you just amazed?
[Apologizes for any grammar/typos, no sleep and no sleep make Rick something something.]
Wednesday, 21 May (Permalink Suds: 1) Entries: Previous Next
Comments
I love you so much, moonpie. I don't usually understand even 1/8 of what you write, even though I try very hard. I miss you!
Posted by: Heather at May 23, 2008 7:37 AM
