FedEx delivered my modem. I got the box, opened it to make sure it was in fact the modem, then slapped the return FedEx label and dropped it off at the FedEx terminal.

Last week, on the day I received my Mac Mini, I trekked over to an Apple Store and picked one up. Since the Mac Mini doesn't come with a modem, and you really need something to connect to the internet, I had to have one.

So right now my old Dell, the one that had the hard drive crash back in December, then started to work again, albeit slowly, now sits in the corner, alone, disused.

And my Grape iMac, the trusty old computer that I nearly killed a few years ago, sits next to it, wondering why it's being neglected. After all, it still works fine. Slow, but fine. I was using it constantly up 'till a few days ago.

But, my dear Grape iMac, you've seen better days.

Now I've got this faster, quieter machine. I can barely tell it's on. The Grape was loud. Very loud. Almost insanely loud. And since it was an all-in-one unit, I couldn't move it away from the monitor.

Let's not mention Tiger. OX 10.4. Grape was running 10.2 and that was the end of it's OS life. Since all the programs I needed (read:wanted) were offered with 10.3 or 10.4, upgrading was necessary. Like NeoOffice (OpenOffice for the Mac). Neat little Office suite. and Vienna, the RSS feedreader. (Which you can actually make your own themes for!) And Audacity and Garageband for podcasting. Newer is so much better.

As for specs, the Mac Mini rules over my Grape iMac.

Processor: 1.66 for the mini, 500mhz for the Grape. (3X better!) (Sure, I could have had the 1.8ghz mac mini, but for what I do, I didn't think it would make that much of a difference.)

Memory: 1GB for the Mini, 160MB for the Grape iMac. (6X better!) (OMG! I was so used to waiting for an application to open, be it Mail or Firefox. I'd watch the icon in the dock bounce up and down, up and down. Now I don't get as many bounces. Nor do I get as many spinning beach balls.)

Hard Drive: 60GB for the Mini, 10GM for the Grape. (6X more storage) (Although, the OS and iLife and the other stuff that Apple put in used up about 20GBs. Seriously.)

CD Burner: The mini has the standard Combo drive (burns CDs, but not DVDs, which is fine with me. My iMac's CD drive broke.

So I'm much happier now. And hopefully I can be more productive, too. Now that I've played with this computer for a few days.

I'm not completely Dell free, though. I've got my old Dell laptop that I use every once in a while. It's an old machine. The battery only lasts for minutes, and the CD drive bay doesn't work. But it does have a network card so it's handy at the library with the wifi. But that's about it.

This article was written by david and published on
April 17, 2007 at 9:27pm.
The article was given the following tags:

• apple
• computer
• dell
• thoughts