When I got my new Dell and moved the old one into the kitchen for HWMBO, I had to quickly move the iMac, so I put it in the guest room upstairs. This was a pain, as I had no internet connection upstairs, and thus couldn’t use it for my iPod or anything else.
I bought a Linksys ethernet bridge last week, and hooked it up yesterday. After a few glitches (very bad manual writing as well as bad design of the installation program) I got it working. The iMac is now up there and connected. My iPod works with its copy of iTunes as well.
The final addition was hooking up the Dell speakers (that I didn’t care to use for my new computer because the old Aiwa system, two speakers that can be hung on the wall and a subwoofer were perfectly good) to the iMac. The sound is gorgeous!
Now I wouldn’t say that this will send me out running to buy a Mac Mini or anything. However, I’m quite pleased with it, and for a very low price (probably about GBP 200 overall, including the iMac itself, the added memory, the 80 GB hard disk, and the copy of OS X) I’ve gotten a very useful little computer. I shall be using it more often now.
The bad news is that the Dell laptop has developed a wheeze. I thought it was the fan, but the exhaust fans on the back are doing fine. If there’s a fan inside, perhaps it’s that. If not, it’s the hard disk noisily packing up. Crumbs!
If there’s a fan inside, perhaps it’s that. If not, it’s the hard disk noisily packing up. Crumbs!
prithee heed Jarvis’ First Law For Computer Users:
There is No Such Thing as too many backups
though I hope for your sake that it’s just getting noisy & cranky in its middle-age.
I don’t keep anything novel on that machine. I only use it when I’m conducting a software testing course. So I doubt I’ll be needing it in the short term and if it packs up it’s only a money problem, not a data loss problem.
The machine I’m using at the moment is backed up continuously. So no problems here, I hope. I have had to tell too many people that their material is totally lost because they didn’t back it up to commit the same mistake myself. That would be like a lawyer dying intestate.