Tag: mac

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The G5 is Alive!

At work I’m still using a PowerMac G5, and it’s still a good machine. I mean, it’s had it’s share of problems since 2004, including having the logic board replaced after a lightning strike (and lack of proper UPS) and having the optical drive replaced, but it’s worked well over the years…

So when I came in on Tuesday and found it was not powered on, I pushed the power button. Nothing happened. I pushed it again. And Again. And 10 more times… and then plugged it into another socket, and tried a different power cord. And then got worried. I pulled out all the RAM, I crossed my fingers, tried again. Nothing… no fans, no whir, no beep… totally dead.

PowerMac G5 At this point, I pulled out my Eee PC and started doing some searches. I assumed it was the power supply, as absolutely nothing happened when the power button was pushed. I found the old G5 power supply replacement program, but the serial numbers did not match up. At this point I figured the only thing to do was to rip the thing apart, so I did.

Luckily, the Powermac G5 Take-Apart Guide was extremely useful. The model G5 did not match exactly, but it was enough to get me going. Let me tell you, getting the power supply out of a G5 is a bitch! I’ve worked on a lot of Macs, but getting the power supply out of this one was a nightmare involving two trips to the hardware store, and multiple “hold your breath” moments along the way.

In the end, I had the power supply out, and tested it for the trickle voltage and found nothing. So at this point I was reasonable sure it had to be the power supply. I called the Apple Store to ask about power supplies for a G5 and as always, they are useless for this sort of thing. I did some searching and found some on ebay for $150 or so, but needed one fast. We ended up finding one from AllMac for $199 and managed to do a little live chatting with them to confirm things, and I ordered the power supply before 3PM California time, and had it in Wisconsin the next day before noon.

By 2PM the next day I had the machine back in action. Less than 24 hours between my testing the power supply, finding it to be dead, getting a replacement ordered and shipped, and having it in place. Damn! 5 gold stars for AllMac on that one…

And while much of the world is running on Intel, the old dual-processor G5 Mac still does a decent job. (At least for now!)

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Multipurpose equals Slow

I’ve heard that multitasking burns more brain cycles due to switching between things, and even though you may think you are getting more done by multitasking, you really aren’t.

You know how your computer seems really fast when you get it, and then after a while it seems like it’s not quite so fast? It’s because of all that crap you add along the way. Those widget, and music scrobbling clients, and Twitter clients, and calendar agents, and notifiers, and on and on…

Video editing is resource intensive, and what I’ve found is that if I’m going to do just editing, I will log out any other users on my Mac (damn you fast user switching!) and then reboot, and then launch Activity Monitor, and quit (or force quit if necessary) any process not directly related to my task. So with a fresh reboot, and no silly little processing doing silly little things, I can go about my work. Alternately, I suppose I could create an account dedicated just to editing, and boot into that, but that’s more of a pain to me…

The reboot and quitting of processes is probably a five minute process, but saves me well over five minutes of time within an hour of editing.

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The Office / Behind the iMac

Yup, that’s right… RasterWeb! World HQ has once again move into a new office. Since this blog started (in August 1997) we’ve probably moved the office seven times now. Moving is always fun! This time, even though we moved to a new building, we managed to maintain our IP address, probably because we experienced less than an hour of downtime.

The Office

The main workstation is set up, as is the server, though we still have about two other machines to set up. And hey, there’s even a window, and it’s got blinds so I won’t be blinded. I may do some funky time-lapse stuff out the window, who knows?

All in all, I am totally digging the new set up so far. Organization, FTW!

Of course there is the dark underbelly… the “Behind the iMac” of this lovely little set up.

Behind the iMac (Redux)

I think this is a major improvement over the old mess that I had (below) mainly because the power is now all hidden under the desk, and there’s not quite as much going on back there.

Behind the iMac

The challenge will be to keep things neat and tidy as we get into working like hell again. This office is bigger, and has a closet, so hopefully it will remain calm and collected.

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New iMac

Remember two months ago, when I got a new iMac? Well, I got a phone call from my brother-in-law saying he was on his way to the Apple Store to pick up a new 20″ Apple iMac.

Apple iMac (New!)

So we’ve got the same computer now! Well, except that in that two month span, Apple redesigned the thing and speed bumped it. For anyone new to the platform, that’s the way Apple works. Get used to it.

Apple iMac (Newer!)

The last time my brother-in-law bought an iMac, Bondi Blue was a hot new color…

Apple iMac (Old!)

Welcome to the future!


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Apple iMac (New!)

If all goes well, I should have a new 20″ Apple iMac in a few days.

Apple iMac

It’s really time for a new Mac. I mean, I probably would have kept on using my G4 for another year or more if it had not died. The last time I bought a new computer was 2001. I even got AppleCare this time, because honestly, I don’t think Apple builds machines as good as they did 6 years ago. (Definitely not as good as they did 10 years ago.) Anyway, I can’t wait to get it and see what it can do. Of course now I need to worry about Universal Binaries and all that Intel related stuff. (A quick check shows that a good number of apps I use daily already have Universal versions.) But honestly, even if the PowerPC apps run slow, they should still be faster than the old G4 was running them. I’ll let you know once I run it through it’s paces.