150. iHave

From iWant (blog 143) to iNeed (147) to iHave, all within the span of a week. Once a purchase gets into my head in a bad way, it usually stays there until I find a way to get my grubby little hands on it. I'm pretty sure I could have held off on the purchase if it weren't for the fact that I needed a faster computer to work on the Story Line project, still it's interesting that the need so closely corresponded with the want.

For the record, I purchased a 1.9GHz 17" iMac which I maxed out with 1.5 gigs of memory. Here's a small kine commercial for Macs. When I first turned on the Mac, one of the things it asks is whether you want to transfer files from an older Mac to this one. I said yes, and it tells me to hook up a firewire cable between my new iMac and my old iBook. It then tells me how to restart my iBook in firewire target mode (which basically turns my iBook into a $1000 firewire drive) and once my iBook boots up, it automatically starts transferring files.

Now here's the amazing bit. Once all the file transfer stuff was done, my new iMac restarted itself and when it did, it looked and behaved exactly like my old iBook. The desktop was the same, all my keyboard/mouse settings were the same, and all the applications I had on my iBook opened up on my iMac. Amazing. Windows is a great operating system...to POOP ON!

Okay there was one problem. ProTools didn't open up properly, which kind of makes sense since I knew there would be licensing issues. I didn't want to bother with figuring out how to re-install the program so I just did a clean re-install of OSX (I wiped the hard drive and did a clean re-install of the Mac OS). This left me with a new iMac minus all the files on my iBook which is fine with me because as far as I'm concerned, they're both for different uses. My iBook is for writing and internet access, my iMac is my workhorse for running ProTools, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver.

Oh, and here's a little tip. The new iMacs (with Intel processors) come with the extended desktop feature enabled (hook up a second monitor and it's a separate window). Old iMacs (with G5 processors) come with this feature disabled. If you hook up a second monitor, it only works in mirror mode (both screens show the same thing). However, there's a program called Screen Spanning Doctor which enables the extended desktop feature on iBooks and iMacs. Just run the program, restart your computer, turn off "mirror desktops" mode and you've just doubled your screen real estate. Groovy.

Why anyone would want to subject themselves to the torture of the Windows platform is beyond me. It's true what they say, "once you go Mac..."