I’ll soon be a Mac user again…

As you saw from my last post where I was fighting with eBay and PayPal, I sold off a bunch of unneeded, and unused computers and computer equipment from around my house. I’m very proud of being able to “let go” of some of this stuff (I tend to be a pack-rat). I honestly came to a realization that no, I won’t ever need that old Socket A CPU I’ve been hanging onto for 5 years

I also made two realizations/decisions about my personal computer here. First, I overbuilt – seriously. I let myself get sucked into an “addiction” I’d broken many years ago – “Benchmark Mania”. I started reading sites such as Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech and ExtremeTech again, and reading about 3DMark scores, and Cinebench Scores, and HDTach scores, and this score, and that score and every little score score…

It really is a vicsious cycle, and it does become addicting (and expensive)…for those who need something to relate too, it’s like hot-rodding cars – there is always something faster, and it’s impossible to keep up.

What I wound up with was a hulking, power-hungry (power-sucking) Overclocked Quad-Core monster with more RAM and more HDD space that I would ever come close to tapping into, unless I was running a benchmark. For day to day tasks, it was really no different, or no faster than the last 3 computers I’ve built – honestly.

Also, I decided that once and for all, I want to be a Mac user again. Messing around with my Hackintosh install of Leopard was the most “fun” I’d had with a computer in ages. Yes, part of it was the “hacking” part of it – you know, making something workt that by all accounts shouldn’t work. But part of it was realizing how much I love the MacOS, and how much better it is at doing what I want to do than either Windows, or any of the many Linux distributions out there. I’m really ready for some simplicity. I also want to get back into doing Music on my Computer again – Composing, Recording and MIDI Sequencing, and I still (and always will) feel that nothing is a better platform for a creative mind than a Macintosh. Also, for a few months I had a chance to use a MacBook Pro at work, and although it wound up going on to someone else, I really developed a love for that little machine (as much as you could love a computer), and it cemented the fact that even after all of these years away, I really *was* a “Mac Guy”, and I missed having one.

So, here is what I did.

First, I shuffled some parts around between my PC (I had just built) and the “Downstairs PC” which was my old PC and between the two built a more “sensible” downstairs PC using the awesome Antec 900 case, Q6600 and Gigabyte motherboard that was in my “new” PC.

I ditched the stupidest purchase I’d ever made – the WD VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM drive. That was the biggest waste of money in the PC, because in reality it made very little difference outside of benchmarks (due to newer OSes doing such a great job with caching), although it *did* boot up a few seconds faster (I rarely reboot anyway – just suspend/resume). The 10K drive, even after being used for several months came just dollars shy of what I paid on NewEgg brand new (eBay amazes me sometimes).

For the “Downstairs PC” I planned to just run Windows XP (32-bit) on the downstairs PC (at least for now), so I left just 4GB of RAM in it (it sees 3.5GB), and about 750GB of HDD Space. I also backed off the overclock, and turned on EIST and C1E to throttle the CPU down when not under heavy load.

That left me with a nice Dual-core, Core2Duo based PC w/ 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD to list on eBay. That was the bulk of my “Mac Money” right there, and I was pleased with what it brought, and I enjoyed talking with the buyer and helping them set up Ubuntu on it!

Also, I “stripped and parted” my other 4 old computers I had up here, and sold the components separately – I’m pretty sure I made more money that way, and components are easier and cheaper to ship than whole PC’s (although it made for more auctions to keep up with). The only parts I did not sell were the Motherboards (simply in case a friend with an older PC has a Mobo die, and “older socket” Mobo’s are hard to find), and the PSU’s – you never know when you’ll need a good Power Supply.

After all of this is said and done, and my new iMac is delivered next week, this will be the computing make-up of my home network:

Upstairs in my bedroom/man-cave I’ll have my new 20″ iMac (which will also be running my left-over 22″ LCD in Extended Desktop mode, which means I’ll have a whopping 3360×1050 pixels of screen-space).

Mom is keeping her old P4 in her room – it only gets booted up for about 30-mins maybe twice a week.

Downstairs is a nice Quad core PC w/ a decent vid card running XP Pro for Mom to use during the day, and for me to “Game” on when I feel like a few rounds of Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike:Source. I fully expect this “Downstairs PC” to last for many years w/o any significant upgrades, although I will probably drop some more RAM in it and upgrade it to Windows 7 at some point – after I convince Mom that it really is better than XP

The best part – even after buing the iMac (it’s already been paid for and on the way, along w/ the MiniDVI to DVI adapter to hook up my 22″), I ended up with $125 more in my Bank Account than I started with.