Hell Yeah!

Oh yeah, Matt's got a "new" computer!! New toy to play with!! :D

How come? Richard at Square Donkey very very kindly gave me his old PowerMac G4 (Qucksilver) and the two Sony CRT monitors that go with it (but I've yet to get them home), so A big big THANKYOU to Richard!

Firstly let me tell you that PowerMacs are bloody heavy! Although thanks to my super strength (!) and an Ikea bag, I managed to get it home by train and bus all the way from london.

I've set it up at home to check it out, give it the once over and run a software update on it and to be honest, I'm very tempted to unplug my PC entirely and just run the PowerMac and my iBook, until such time I can set both up (probably after the move), of course this buggers me for printing stuff at home as I only have an old HP Deskjet 690C, with a parallel connection (I can't be arsed to get a converter as i want a laser printer anyway).

There is something comforting about seeing MacOS X on my Evesham monitor, I'm also surprised as to how good the PM's internal speaker sounds, considering it's an internal speaker!

One of the main issues at the mo with it, is that it's running MacOS 10.2.8 (Jaguar) because it's got Avid Xpress DV 3.5 installed which won't run on anything newer :/ Now here's the quandry, I want to run Avid, so I can learn the interface and get some experience cutting with it (Avid FreeDV just isn't the same), but I also want to run FCP 4.5, which needs 10.3.2 at least. Damn. (Plus the lack of Expose has already caught me out once!)

However, it feels surprisingly nippy. It's got an 800MHz G4 (slower than my iBook) and a generous 1.25Gb of RAM, which is clearly helping it along. It's got an ATI graphics card in there, but I'm not sure which model (has both DVI & VGA outputs), 40Gb HDD and, I believe, a Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW), although I have yet to test that to check (I know it's not a DVD writer as iDVD refused to open).

So, I'm looking into how much I can pimp this by, eg: Processor upgrade, optical drive upgrade, add HDD's, graphics upgrade, FW800, and also I'm pretty sure OS X allows you to boot from and external drive, which may be the answer to my FCP4.5 issue, but I'll have to check.

I'm typing this on the PM at the mo, in Firefox, the stripyness of the Jaguar interface is a tad odd, but it's very responsive. It also has an Airport card in there, cheers!, it's an original card I',m guessing as I had to change my router settings to Mixed to allow both 802.11g & b, as the PM wouldn't connect initially.

If I'm honest here, da da da da daaa I'm lovin it! L8r.

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