Day-5 (Mac Experiment)
by Jesse on Feb.27, 2011, under Macintosh Experiment
Ok, I might be sold.
Though the outdated hardware has posed a few limitations, I’m not so worried about that. I did just order a Dual 2.5Ghz G5 off Ebay for $300 because the one thing I *AM* driven nuts by is the pounding that this single 1.6Ghz PPC chip is completely incapable of taking. I’m hoping that the new one has more than the 4 DIMM slots this one has…more memory couldn’t hurt. 
I’ve obtained a copy of Mac:Office 2008, Photoshop, and a few other neat pieces to play with, but so far I’ve not dove completely into it. (My laptop is still on my desk as well, just in case I should need it) Entourage 2008 Web Service edition was added because of course, I’m running Exchange2010, and WebDAV has been removed after Exchange2k7.
The other thing I’ve noticed is the backup/restore process worked wonderfully. I wiped the drives and built a new 1.8TB RaidSet on the new drives, which finally gave me a partition of appropriate size, and booted from the CD, Selecting “Restore from TimeMachine backup”
Impressively enough it took less than 2.5 hours to restore the OS and everything I had done on it to that point. When it rebooted, there were no strange messages, though on opening the “Mail” app, I found that it had to go and re-import all of the mail that had already been downloaded.
Oh well, not THAT huge a deal.
I’ve done something similar with Windows7 recently, but it required a “RecoveryCD” be made before you could run the restore.
The best part of this new setup, by far. Is access to BASH. I *HATE* that there doesn’t seem to be a decent CygWin shell anywhere on the market for windows. I do a *LOT* of shell scripting both for work and because I find it fun, and this makes life very easy.