Well I have had an interesting week…all caused by the sudden decision by my computer to not start up. As you all may or may not know…I am a geek. A computer geek to be more specific and my business and hobby revolves around my computer system working properly. Because of my need for system stability I use all Apple products. Align my need for this technology and my cheap skate nature and you get the situation I found myself in late last week. My beloved Powermac G5 is going on 5 years old (which is wonderful for a computer used the way I use it) and it is starting to act weird. I bought this system refurbished and it was the low end at the time so I did not spend all that much on it. Needless to say I have more than got my money’s worth!

So as my computer decided to take a day off I of course freak out and think I have lost all data (given that my backup drive failed the week before this is potentially tragic!) and I need to replace the system ASAP. Well I was able to use a laptop to move all of my data to a new backup drive and all is saved! I also used the laptop to order my replacement system right then. This proved to be somewhat of an overreaction. For some odd reason, after 12 hours of backing up the data my G5 decided it was okay. The thing started right up like nothing was ever wrong! I did run some tests and did some repairs and it seems to be operating normally now. Too bad G5…you had your chance and you will now live out the remainder of your life as a media center in our game room! More on that project later.

So anyway here is how far the professional models from Apple have come in 5 years. (for the record I did not cheap out this time and went for a middle of the road system)
The processor on the old G5 was dual 1.8GHz 64-bit processors with 1 GHz front side bus per processor and 512mb cache per processor. The new systems brings dual 2.8 GHz Quad-core 64-bit processors (yes that means 8 processors!) with 1.6GHz front side bus per processor and 12MB cache per processor. So what does that mean? It means that in 5 years these systems have gotten about 10 times faster across the board!

The old G5 could handle 16GB of RAM of which space I had 2.5GB installed. The newbie will hold up to 32GB of which I will have 10GB. G5 could handle 2 internal hard drives up to 3TB of total space and the MacPro will hold 4 internal drives having up to 6TB of space. That means that new one will operate 4 times as many functions at once than the other one or make those functions 4 times faster at the same quantity and it has the potential to house so much more it looks to be well onto the 5 year life span of the good old G5.

I am excited about the prospect of using the old system as a media server and center for my game room…I will detail the plans for that project and let you know how it works out!

J