random ramblings of a crazed nerd

Well I have had a light day, one could almost say a day off, but sadly as usual, work beckons from random places, and I do need to finish a write-up for a server migration here in a bit, but all in all a light day. I have been pondering getting rid of the iMac, don’t get me wrong, it’s working great, it’s doing backups right now over rsync to the server here in-house (yay Ubuntu) - but the downside to the iMac for me, is lack of expansion.

I bought the iMac as my first jump from PPC -> Intel, and was very happy, over a year now I have had this and not a blip, so very happy with its performance, but lately I find myself doing more, running more apps, and of course working across the board with Vista/XP/Linux all at once, and I think I’d benefit from a big-daddy Mac Pro, which means of course getting Cinema displays, and since I don’t want a sexy Cinema display with a dorky Sceptre LCD, that of course means buying two

So I priced my MacPro if I were to take the plunge and get one, $3,816.95 out the door, express shipping - and I’d have it the first of July. What does that get me?

• 4 Cores (2 x 2ghz Xeon Dual Cores)
• Bluetooth 2.0 / Wifi (802.11n)
• 1GB of Ram (upgradeable to 16gb)
• 250GB SATA (3 additional bays for upgrades)
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB
• 2 x 20inch Cinema Displays

Quite a package, would give me some major room for upgrades (Ram is nearly 50% cheaper buying it from Newegg for 2GB), but the upgrade functionality of the system alone, folks have upgraded out the Xeon’s for larger Dual and Quad core processors, so there is that as well, just not stuck to a certain speed/drive/ram.

Not 100% sure about it yet, while I want to find a buyer for the iMac first, at the same time I’d like to keep it around and migrate stuff off, but in the end I’ll probably just run the new backup script I wrote to rsync my folders -> sparky2.0 and see if anyone can give tips on low-level formatting a iMac, re-install 10.4.x and put it on eBay, starting at $1,000 the least I want to get out of it, but hope for at least $1200 (one can hope!).

But who knows, might not do it at all, and love my iMac for another year and take the plunge, but then again, I do want to simplify my office, reduce clutter, and be more productive… suppose I could do that other ways, but a MacPro sounds handy

Anywhoo - back to my mild-day-off, have a good friday folks.