Miles Arts Blog

It’s been approximately 2 and half weeks since I purchased the latest MacPro Workstation. I’ve already sold and delivered my last system for $1,000.00 to Josh. I’ll miss that computer. It was a last generation G4 Mirrored Drive Door PowerPC. Very reliable. We’d been through a lot together. Alas, updated technology (and my new job) brings me a newfound work horse.I love it. The current configuration is:

• Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors
• 2GB memory (667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC)
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory
• 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive
• 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive
• 16x double-layer SuperDrive

I’ve successfully loaded Windows XP with Boot Camp (Beta). It appears to be working like a charm (very fast, very snappy). I haven’t used any memory intensive programs on the Windows side yet but I’ve read that it’s performance is outstanding. Initially, I was going to install parallels but decided to return the software because it doesn’t support DirectX. I have no need for DirectX but I’m not convinced that Parallels VM will produce an exact replica of the Windows XP environment.

Jack (our resident Mac tech at work) tells me that VMWare will be all rage in the next year or so. It enables a computer to run multiple operating systems (and or servers) simultaneously and yet they remain completely independent of one another. There are many advantages to this. For example, if one of several systems crashes – the stability of the others is completely unaffected. It’s so simple – almost stupid it hasn’t been done before.

And now for the real reason I started this category, to document the differences (issues) between the older (G4, G5) Macs and the new Intel Macs.

1. Office 2004 for Mac – Word doesn’t handle fonts well or at all. At this point, the program crashes if I try to select a new font. There’s an interesting blog online about it. Apparently, I’m not the only one. I tried a couple of the proposed fixes to no avail. Reloading the software might fix it… Error message: “Cannot Locate the Microsoft Framework Library.”
2. SecondLife will occasionally crash my entire system!! This is odd. Generally, a program will just quit instead of crash the entire operating system. Perhaps, it’s a faulty ram chip? More testing is in order… (!) 4/10/07 I purchased an ATI x1900 512 MB Graphics card to replace the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB. These problems have completely stopped. I’m in love with this new card! It helps speed everything up and makes everything super clear. This fix may have also occurred because I reseated all the ram chips when installing the graphics card.
3. DVD Player works okay but displays strange characters at the top of the window. (!) 4/10/07 Haven’t encountered this problem in a while now.