Mat on Macs

WOW! My 17″ iMac is now running a Virtualized copy of Win XP thanks to Parallels Workstation for Mac (luckily I still owned a copy of XP from the bad old days before I saw the Mac light). It is in fact, quite responsive, though there is definitely still quite a bit of work to be done (e.g. networking is fragile–thanks to endemic Windows suckiness–and there’s no sound support yet), but this is really shocking. Firefox and WIndows Media Player run just fine, opening up web content previously unavailable on the Mac. I’m personally much more interested in a virtualization solution like this one that in dual booting, though I’m also going to try Boot Camp tomorrow just see what kind of gaming performance old Bonaventure is capable of. All in all, an amazing week; watch out for those flying pigs!

Apple’s Migration Assistant is a great idea; get a new Mac, put your old Mac in Firewire Disk Mode, and seamlessly transfer all your files and settings. What could be wrong with that? Well if your new mac is an Intel Mac and your old mac is not, then you may have some problems. I of course didn’t think about this; so I merrily transferred everything over and started BONAVENTURE. Well he didn’t like that one bit. CLARE, my Powerbook from which I was transferring everything, of course had tons of login items and prefpanes which ended up being incompatible with the Intel iMac. After some cursing and forced restarts I managed to get rid of most of the incompatible software. However, if I were doing it again I just copy over my files manually (Home folder, Applications folder, and a some items from /Library).

Here he is, my new 17″ Intel iMac which I’ve named BONAVENTURE. He’s pretty much straight out of the box except for one obvious addition–the Dell 2005FPW, 20″ widescreen LCD running in extended desktop mode (no Dell haters please; I got this display for more than $400 less than the equivalent ACD and have been very pleased with it). This required purchasing the mini-DVI to DVI adaptor (originally made for the 12″ Powerbook). One surprising thing I noticed is how much better the Dell looks than the built-in 17″ LCD on the iMac. I adjusted the color settings and that improved things a but, but side-by-side there’s really no comparison; the Dell is much nicer looking (interestingly, the actual LCD panel inside the Dell is apparently the same one as the 20″ iMac and 20″ Cinema Display, so I assume those screens would also look much better than the 17″).

The main problem with this iMac out of the box is that (at 512MB), it’s memory starved. That makes switching between applications quite tiresome, so much so in fact that I’m making this post from my 15″ Powerbook G4. I have already ordered more RAM from Data Memory Systems but they haven’t even gotten their stock in yet (hopefully I’ll get my part next week). I had a good experience with Datamem in the past and their price was very good; I just hope they can deliver soon, because I really need it.

The iMac uses a DDR2 PC2-5300 SODIMM which are evidently new enough that they’re hard to find. My normal preferred supplier Newegg doesn’t even list that part in their database. I find it rather annoying that Apple chose to use SODIMMs (i.e. notebook memory) in the new iMacs, which of course makes it cost more than the corresponding desktop size DIMMs

[update: I installed the new 1GB stick and it makes all the difference in the world! Running a new iMac without at least 1GB just isn’t going to cut it]