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.