Saturday morning I turned on my PC and basically the screen did not come on (I have it on standby). Suspicious but has happened before. So I press the powerbutton to do a reset and then it did single beep followed by 8 rapid beeps. That’s the bios telling you: this pc is FOOBARRED, please try installing a new motherboard. Or something. Good luck with that. Anyway, eight beeps and nothing.
After the predictable “godverdomme, kutzooi”, which needs no translation here, I calmed down and did what I was planning to do anyway (by coincidence). Which was visiting the local Apple store. Or rather the Gravis M&S store on the Ernst Reuter Platz here in Berlin, a nice big store specialized in reselling all the nice Apple gadgets along with a helpdesk and good support options (I hate putting expensive hardware in the mail). So, I basically already decided to go for an imac. Question: which one. Eh … why go for anything less than the biggest one? Sure it costs money but it I’ll be spending the next few years glued to its screen. So 24”, 3Ghz dual core cpu, 4GB ram, a 1TB diskdrive and a nice nivida chipset with 512MB (which will no doubt run X-plane just fine).
Anyway, they didn’t have one in store with an English keyboard. So they made the order for me and told me “one and a half week”. So, to my pleasant surprise, I got the call already today that they had my new imac ready. So I fetched it, plugged it in and enjoyed the famous Apple out of the box experience, which is excellent.
Then I went to work installing the basics: firefox, adium, skype and some other essentials. I haven’t gotten around to applying all the tweaks I have on my work laptop but will of course be doing that to fix e.g. annoying home-end key behavior and a couple of other things.
I am now in need of:
- A proper usb mouse (sorry but the mighty mouse will join its brother in a drawer)
- A USB2 - SATA converter to read both internal drives in my old PC with all my music, photos and other essentials. I have a pretty recent backup on an external drive but had gotten a bit sloppy backing up the last few months. BTW. I noticed that NTFS is read only on macs, so any tips for fixing that are welcome. Macfuse seems to be one option, any alternatives?
- To fix that, I will need a nice new big external drive to hook up to time machine.
Not all is great though:
- The keyboard sucks compared to the one that came with my Mac Book Pro last year. WTF is up with the weirdly small enter key and the weird symbols where it used to say page down, page up, etc.
- The mighty mouse still stinks
- All the mobile me and .mac spam on first launch is kind of annoying
Anyway, happy to be online again.