Using the spoils from the 2007 holiday season, I built a solid workstation/gaming system that has carried me through 2008. The vital statistics:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+
- 2 GB RAM
- GeForce 7600 GS (512 MB)
- Dual boot Ubuntu (64-bit) / WinXP
- Two 19″ CRTs
A few months ago I bought a MacBook Pro that currently has these main features:
- Intel Core 2 Duo (2.4 GHz)
- 2 GB RAM
- GeForce 8600M GT (256 MB)
- Mac OS X 10.5 with openSUSE 11.0 running in Parallels
- 15″ LCD (1440 x 900)
I am comparing these two, thinking about how much I love using my MacBook, and wondering why I am bothering to keep the desktop running at all. I almost never play Windows games, I’ve just now ordered a 22″ LCD to get dual-displays with the MacBook, and with just a little effort I could get OS X talking to the more “Linuxy” features of my network.
I think it’s time to go all out with the MacBook Pro. I’ll see if I can handle the annoyance of having to plug it in to a makeshift docking station. I’ll experiment with getting my development tools running in OS X (emacs, Eclipse, Apache, PHP, etc). It’s time for change. Yes we can!
I gave up on my home desktop some time ago, and have cut down on my working from home. Most of the time I leave it off, and have got all my free dev tools setup on my eeepc. When I do work from home, I fire up the VPN and remote into my work computer. Eventually I’d like to get a smaller desktop, maybe a shuttle, as I still play games pretty frequently.
I say go for it.
I actually setup my Macbook Pro to network with my wife’s laptop, which is running Win Vista and my stepson’s PC, which is running Win XP. I’m still in that coolness stage after I struggled for a weeks to get it done, but the nice thing is I can access pictures which were imported throughout the year on my wife’s laptop and pictures, which were imported on my son’s PC, for the past couple of years. But if it weren’t for the pix and documents, I’d go MBP all the way. So, if you don’t have any important docs or music, I’d consider donating it to the local electronics recycling company (after clearing off the HDD of course).
Deza, the best solution for a multi-platform environment might be a network attached storage (NAS) device. A consumer NAS is basically a little box that contains a harddrive which you plug into your network; the NAS then works some protocol magic to allow access by Mac, Windows, and UNIX platforms. Example.
Nice, thanks. I was looking at Apple’s expensive as $hit Time Capsule since it also includes an Airport Router. But this is definitely a nice, cheaper version which looks like I can plug in two SATA hard drives.