Gear

Yesterday I picked up a 500Gig Western Digital SATA drive for the Mac Pro. Installation couldn’t be easier with these things. You just pull out the drive sleeve, screw on the drive, and slide it back in. No cables. Then when you boot up your system, you tell it how you want to format the drive and off you go. This brings me up to 1 Terabyte of storage.

I also picked up a Razer Copperhead, which works remarkably well with the stock OSX mouse drivers. Far more accurate than the old Logitech MX-1000 I had been using. I just don’t get the level of accuracy I need from a wireless mouse (bluetooth or otherwise) under OSX.

Later, I downloaded Bootcamp, partitioned a 100Gig slice, and installed Windows Vista Home Premium. Everything worked like a dream, except for the fact that I had to spring for the full (non-upgrade) version of the software in order to get it to work. The Mac Pro gets “rated” by Windows Vista as a “5 out of 5″ for performance, and after installing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and giving it a go, I can see why.

It blows away my old Windows box in every concievable fashion. Vista is also a very pretty operating system…

So now I have a “1 box fits all” solution. An OSX video and photo editing monster with 900Gigs of storage, and a Windows Vista machine with 100Gigs for gaming. This should keep me going for the next 5-6 years or so.

Mucked around with iMovie for awhile after midnight. Made a simple DVD which displayed some photos in a slideshow fashion (the photos were from a paintball tourney a couple years ago.) It’s easy to get some pretty nifty looking results, but I can already see that the limitations of iMovie will force me to move on to Final Cut Express rather quickly.

…

Still struggling with my cold. Missed work on Friday with a temperature, and now I’m in the “infinite nose drainage” stage.

And now Lauren is symptomatic too.