comanchepilot
En-Route
My 2006 20" iMac finally bit the dust a couple days ago. When I say bit the dust - one of the 2gb chipsets failed. Now, its not that big a deal - the computer is a 2005 spec model - so it is essentially 9 years old - it owed me not a dime.
The last year or so its been pretty pekid when it came to performance - lots of spinning wheels while it accessed this swap file or that. It was also running 10.5.8 which was as far as I could go - none of the OS software was being supported anymore and Gmail would warn me that this version of Safari was not longer being supported.
Yet, I was using it every day. Drafting letters, making spreadsheets, and presentations and blogging and all that good stuff.
I could have easily bought a couple of new memory chips and went right back to work. But it seemed like an omen. After 9 YEARS of faithful service, perhaps it was time to put it to bed. . . .
Damn, new computers are pricey. Would have been $1600 to just replace what I had and I wanted a bigger monitor- who doesn't, right? Which got me thinking about my options . . . I went to a store I know locally and found a mid 2012 Mac Mini. I bought a 500gb / 8gb RAM version for $650 incl tax, along with a provided used Apple wireless keyboard and mouse.
My laptop is running OS 10.10, and my Mac mini had 10.10 - so I did what any self-respecting Geek would do - I cloned my laptop. While that ran Tuesday night [it took 5 hours with an ethernet cable] I was on the old computer with - albeit very slowly with only 2gb of ram - moving the data.
Thankfully - my data is mostly backed up so the only stuff on my computer was the current work product which took mere moments to transfer to the media server. all of my music, video, and photos are on a 2TB media server - so after only about an hour - we were done. The Migration Assistance App on a Mac is great. . . . one word of warning however - both systems need to be running the same OS unless you are coming from Windoze. . .
And I can spend the $1000 flying!
The last year or so its been pretty pekid when it came to performance - lots of spinning wheels while it accessed this swap file or that. It was also running 10.5.8 which was as far as I could go - none of the OS software was being supported anymore and Gmail would warn me that this version of Safari was not longer being supported.
Yet, I was using it every day. Drafting letters, making spreadsheets, and presentations and blogging and all that good stuff.
I could have easily bought a couple of new memory chips and went right back to work. But it seemed like an omen. After 9 YEARS of faithful service, perhaps it was time to put it to bed. . . .
Damn, new computers are pricey. Would have been $1600 to just replace what I had and I wanted a bigger monitor- who doesn't, right? Which got me thinking about my options . . . I went to a store I know locally and found a mid 2012 Mac Mini. I bought a 500gb / 8gb RAM version for $650 incl tax, along with a provided used Apple wireless keyboard and mouse.
My laptop is running OS 10.10, and my Mac mini had 10.10 - so I did what any self-respecting Geek would do - I cloned my laptop. While that ran Tuesday night [it took 5 hours with an ethernet cable] I was on the old computer with - albeit very slowly with only 2gb of ram - moving the data.
Thankfully - my data is mostly backed up so the only stuff on my computer was the current work product which took mere moments to transfer to the media server. all of my music, video, and photos are on a 2TB media server - so after only about an hour - we were done. The Migration Assistance App on a Mac is great. . . . one word of warning however - both systems need to be running the same OS unless you are coming from Windoze. . .
And I can spend the $1000 flying!
