The MacAlba

The Mac PowerBook G4 that I’ve been using at work comes to the end of its lease in a week or so. I took delivery of a MacBook Pro today to replace it. And, Holy CPU Cycles Batman!, my old PowerBook is now being shown up for the slow, memory-lacking box that it is.

The old box is a 1.5 Ghz G4 PowerBook with 1 Gbyte of memory, the new is a 2.33 Ghz Core 2 Duo device with 3 Gbytes of memory. I ordered a 3 Gbyte system rather than a 2 Gbyte device such that I can experiment with virtualisation using either Parallels or VMware Fusion.

The thing that impressed me the most, though, was the ease with which I could move from old to new system. I reinstalled OSX (just because that what I would do on any system), and, rather than re-install each custom application and copy my data files from an intermediate backup drive, I decided to try the “copy from the old machine via Firewire� routine. It took a bit over an hour to move over 40 Gbytes of files and the new system “it just works�.

After just a few hours using the new laptop I’m very happy with the brighter LCD screen, and the almost forgotten snappiness afforded by a system that can cope with the work being asked of it.

I realise that Apple will, no doubt, be announcing newer, zippier models next week, but the timing was just wrong for me.

Monthly rainfall tallies for the past 5 years (in millimetres), as at 20 km east of Armidale, NSW.

      Jan   Feb   Mar   Apr   May   Jun   Jul   Aug   Sep   Oct   Nov   Dec    Total
2002  50.0  80.0  78.7   3.5   4.3  21.9  10.3  58.2  26.7  25.0  83.2  75.6   517.4
2003  51.6 144.5  52.7 108.7  39.1  31.8  18.9  23.0   5.7  91.3  55.9  71.1   694.3
2004 192.1  77.8  65.2  22.4   5.4  20.4  43.3  49.6  45.9 111.2  69.0 133.8   836.0
2005  92.9  66.3  16.2  13.2  18.8  82.6  20.9  13.4  87.1  60.2 154.3  98.7   724.6
2006 109.5 115.2 110.2  22.5   3.6  45.8  46.4  30.8  44.8  29.8 133.6  43.8   735.0

The 135 year average for Armidale (in millimetres) is:

Avg  104.5  87.1  65.0  45.9  44.4  56.9  49.2  48.4  51.6  67.8  80.4  89.2   790.1