Initial Dual 1.25Ghz Powermac Impressions

I've only had the machine for a few hours, and haven't done anything real with it yet, but I'm impressed so far. I also haven't received the 20" Cinema Display so the machine is sitting in a temporary location with my old 19" Trinitron monitor. Anyway, it's fast, very fast.

I'm a little embarrased to say, but most of my time has been spent playing with Virtual PC. This is mainly because I'm just amazed that it can run Windows XP at a usable speed on a completely different platform. This is the first time I've ever seen an emulator that is actually useable running something so complex. Of course I don't really have anything that I want to run under Windows right now, I just ended up installing Mozilla and Phoenix to see how they ran. I also spent some time playing Diablo and it runs at a perfectly usable speed, I doubt it could handle Diablo II though. I have a Linux virtual PC installation that I'll copy over once my monitor arrives and I get around to hooking up the Cube again.

One thing that I really love about the Mac is how easy it is to setup a new machine. All I did was put my Powerbook in Firewire target disk mode and copy over my home directory. Once that was done I logged out and logged back in and everything except the developer tools were right where they were on my laptop. This is about 100 times easier then digging out all your installer CDs to setup a new windows machine. It also applies to any virtual PC virtual machines, just copy them over and start right where you left off. The developer tools are just reinstalled from the installer that was already on the drive. Total time involved less then an hour.

One funny thing was I had to actually look in the manual to figure out how to open the CD drive. Both my other Macs have slot loading drives, but on the Powermac you have to use the button on the keyboard. Turns out there was a sticker to that effect on the keyboard that came with it, unfortunately I was using the keyboard from my Cube and I forget there was an eject button on it.

One disappointment so far, the VGA adapter only fits on the ADC port. This means that when I get my ADC based display I won't be able to hook up my CRT as a second monitor without buying another adapter for the DVI interface. Not a huge deal since I kind of want to get rid of the CRT anyway, but still disappointing. Can't wait for the display to arrive tomorrow.

Posted by Kimbro Staken