The Sinister Moose

Those of you that know me, know that I'm a rabid Mac user. Not to "beat a dead horse" as it were, but I would rather use a slow Mac, than a blazing fast Windows computer that tends to crash.

 

I'm very addicted to the reliability and the capability of the Apple Operating system know as OS X Leopard. Since I made the switch (back when OS X Jaguar was introduced) I've owned and loved a succession of Apple desktop and laptop computers.

My first was a Dual Processor Quicksilver 800Mhz G4, with a, at-the-time, massive 21" Cinema display. Keep in mind that at the time I ran a Technology Consulting company which dealt with multiple clients using Microsoft Windows ennvironments, so I'm fairly well versed in all things Windows. However one of my clients, which happended to be a printing company, offered me this Quicksilver G4 and display so that I could learn to network, repair, and maintain Macs.

I was skeptical because my only experiences with Macs prior to this were with computers that were little beige boxes with an operating system that felt obtuse, and difficult to configure. Not to mention the high degree of proprietary hardware that was require just to run a Mac. I remember in the days of the beige Macs, a 56K modem cost a whopping $300, when I could buy 56K modems for PCs for under $100.

However, I took my new toy home and the rest as-they-say is history.

I bought a bigger more powerful a Mirror Drive Door G4 (MDD) with AGP graphics, and two 800Mhz Processors and immediately installed the maximum amount of ram and some bigger hard drives, as well as a very expensive AGP video card that really made it much faster.

Shortly there after, I picked up another MDD G4 only this one had two 1.42GHz processors, and I maxed it out in short order. I bought my wife a G3 iBook snow, and myself a G4 17" Aluminum PowerBook 1.25GHz.

I decided I needed to upgrade my Desktop PowerMac, so I found a G5 1.6Ghz single processor model for a very cheap price and set to upgrading it as far as it would go, but unfortunately it lacked the punch of two processors, so I went in search of a dual processor G5, which I found cheaply enough in the form of a G5 2.0Ghz DP, lovingly referred to as "The Cheese Grater".

Now I was into the realm of SATA hard drives, and modern high speed ram, and this thing screamed.

I ran OS X Panther (10.3) on this machine, then upgraded to Tiger 10.4 as soon as it was available. This G5 became my everyday work horse. It failed one time, when I attempted to use a questionable hard drive, which gave the G5 fits. However, the operating system never crashed and continually offered enough performance to keep me from looking at newer G5 Quad processor models.

I took a keen interest in Apple's decision to use Intel Processors, instead of those produced by IBM/Motorola, and I immediately went on the defensive being overly protective of my G5 PowerPC processors.

I constantly, and loudly exclaimed my bitter distrust of Intel, and my hatred of this decision to switch to the cheap processors. "No good will come of this!" I said on many occassions.

When Apple rolled out the G5 Xeon multiprocessor MacPros, I pointed and yelled "Heretics!" or "Blasphemers!" And admittedly Apple gave me good reason to do so because those models were water cooled and had issues where the coolant would leak and destroy the computer. "Ha Ha! I told you!" I yelled and giggled maniacly while rolling my office chair back to my beloved G5 PowerMac.

Shortly there after I learned of the OSX86 Project, and having been a fan of Linux since administering AIX servers for a few years, I got curious.

The idea of actually using my much loved OS X Tiger operating system on a generic PC really attracted my interest. PC hardware is cheap, and even after switching to the Intel processors the price of new Apple desktops and laptop did not fall as Apple predicted.

I began reading and studying everything I could find about the OSX86 Project and before long I was convinced that I could make it work on some old PC hardware. Sure enough, after jumping through all the hoops, reconfiguring the OS X software and writing a few lines of code myself, I was off to the races. I was now running OS X Tiger 10.4 on a Dell 4600C with a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Hyperthreading processor and 4 gig of ram.

Now I was hooked. Not only did the new MacDell hybrid scream, it out performed my beloved G5 Cheese Grater, easily twice as fast, and with no crashes, or other Windows related craziness.

While my G5 DP 2.0Ghz is reliable, and runs OS X Leopard 10.5, it's at the bottom end of performance when it comes to the Leopard operating system. So, I found a used, Dell e510, which needed a new power supply, but had the Pentium D 3.2Ghz Core Duo processor. Unfortunately this Dell has a 4GB memory limit, but it was reportedly capable of running OS X Leopard very well.

I configured and installed a version of OS X Leopard already customized by some members of the OSX86 Project and in a matter of 15 minutes, I had a new Core Duo MacDell that really, really screams. It has me somewhat spoiled now.

But my Geek story doesn't end there.

I gave my wife my 17" Powerbook, as I wasn't using it any more and it's faster than her iBook Snow. A client brought me a laptop with a broken power jack, and gave me the laptop for my data recovery services. The Acer Aspire 5100 was in excellent shape, other than the broken power jack. So I ordered a replacement power jack, disassembled the laptop, and soldered the new jack in place. While I had it apart, I added a new AMD Turion X2 ZM-82 Ultra CPU which runs at 2.2Ghz with 1MB of L2 cache per core. I also upgraded the hard drive to a 250GB 7200RPM momentus SATA drive, and bumped the ram to 4 Gig.

I re-installed the preloaded operating system (Windows Vista Home Premium) and that ran for all of 3 hours before annoying me so much I lowlevel formatted the hard drive to be rid of that abomination.

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 64 Bit, and everything simply worked. No fussing about, hunting for drivers, or praying that everything is recognized. I was able to customize the Gnome desktop to resemble a Mac by using the Mac4Lin files, and I used the laptop for nearly a year with no problems.

Now I've started a new consulting gig, and all the software they use is Windows Based. (Yuck) The owner of the company has a point however; "If it wasn't for Windows, there weould be a lot of technicians out of work."

He's right. Can you imagine a world where there aren't computer problems? That would put millions out of work. But I digress.

In order to do this new gig, I needed a Windows computer.

I used my Acer Aspire 5100, and installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. You'll remember that I really dislike using Windows, and I wanted to kill people everytime I tried to use Vista.

So for humanity's sake, I prayed to the techno-gods that Microsoft finally pulled it's head out of it's ass, and fixed everything that was wrong with Windows.

I've been using Windows 7 for 3 days now, and I can say that it's better than Vista, but it's still chock-full-o shit that I don't need. Yes I know, I bought the Ultimate version, so that brings with it, a boat load of gimmicks, gadgets and bling that I will never use, and don't particularly like.

However I can report that it has not crashed, it has not annoyed the crap out of me by asking me if I want to do something, and provided nothing happens in the next 24 hours, it doesn't seem to be that big of a resource hog.

It still lacks the snappy performance of my OS X Leopard operating system, but it does start quickly and shuts down quickly, and I've plugged in several devices and used a bluetooth mouse all with out 7 pissing down it's leg and falling over.

Do I think Microsoft has fixed Windows? Um... NO! It still needs anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-anti-anti... however it's the best leap forward in a Windows operating system I've seen since the switch from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95.

That being said, I don't want this to sound like a ringing endorsement and if you tell anyone I said it's good, I'll deny it to the end.

I do not yet recommend Windows 7. I will continue to recommend Macs and OS X, until I can turn on a Windows computer and not have to worry about virus files, and malware.

The only way to truly protect Windows from this malicious type of software is to never use it on the intarwebs. Because of what I do, that is simply not an option.

Talk to ya later.