Requiem for a heavyweight

I’ve been mostly offline for the past couple of weeks, a situation that in today’s society is akin to being in a coma. It started with a hard drive crash, and all the efforts that are required to restore a computer after a crash. Then it was followed by another hard drive crash, and so I went through all the issues again – except that now I was very short on spare hard drive space and had to start arranging my backups like a tile puzzle, shifting backup files from one drive to another to make room for backups and restorations. I bought 2 new drives, got everything arranged the way I wanted it, made double-sure my most critical information (and it seems like it’s all critical) was safely backed up, and was in the midst of backing up the new configuration when

the doorbell rang. Only no one was at the door. Not unusual; our wireless doorbell picks up stray signals from time to time. But the clocks in the kitchen were blinking. And the computer was off. The lights weren’t on so if they’d blinked, I didn’t notice. But when I went to restart the computer, I didn’t get a happy Mac. Or a sad Mac, or a confused Mac, or anything else. Absolutely no reaction. So, despite being on a surge protector, a power surge had fried my old G4.

Now, this old machine owed us nothing. It was a G4 dual processor 450 mHz, nearly nine years old hopelessly antiquated in a lot of ways (streaming video, for instance, could hardly be called “streaming” on that machine), and yet still surprisingly capable. I could still run iTunes, Photoshop, Word, Firefox, Excel, Mail and everything else all at once, and it really didn’t suffer too badly. It had been useless for games for years, but that’s what a Playstation is for anyway. But it had certainly served us well all these years, and I was genuinely shocked it was dead.

So the choice was to go cheap and get an iMac that would be wickedly fast by G4 standards, but would have limited expandability, or go top-dollar and get the Mac Pro Quad Core. Well, based on the lesson learned from buying at the top of the range the last two times, my third Mac in 15 years is the Mac Pro. It does some things, like importing images, so fast I get whiplash looking at it. Even the inside of the box is sexy. And while I anticipated spending another several days getting all my old files back in order, Apple’s Migration Assistant put all my files in place, including my mailbox settings, in about an hour. An hour. It was incredible.

So let’s see if this big shiny aluminum box (even bigger than the G4) goes for 9 years.