My iMac configuration is now a 100GBP cheaper than when I bought it, them swine’s. I hope this is in response to intels recently announce drastic price cuts in the core duo, otherwise if it gets even cheaper soon I really will be feeling queasy. Haha. I guess you just have to expect these things, tech goods come down in price all the time don’t they, you just have to buy things and be happy.
Paul Thorrott’s mini write-up of parallels isn’t entirely positive, and I emailed him because i don’t feel his experience quite mirrors my own. This wouldn’t be anything extraordinary, except that he emailed me back, with quite a well thought out reply within the hour. Gosh, that guy must be a grade 70 typist (or whatever they call good typists haha) ‘cos I’m sure he must get shit loads of nutty emails from us neanderthals constantly all day long.

Speaking of parallels, if you have an intel based mac, or are soon to be getting one, unless you’ve already missed the boat now is a wise time to register a copy because its half price until the official release date.

Make it stop, make it stop! I’ve completely lost the ability to write on this damn thing. I had such great ideas! I was going to unleash my plan for world domination: phase 2. Ah well, maybe tomorrow.

My brother’s PC imploded the other day, actually it’s the second time its done this. Months ago it blew the psu out, smelly, so I gave him a spare that i had kicking around. Now the same thing has happened to that one. lol well I think that was the last straw ‘cos he’s thrown it out on the street and bought an iMac. Well, you’d be mad to replace a PC with well, another PC these days wouldn’t you.

Unfortunately his first day of mac ownership hasn’t gone exactly to plan and he made damn sure that I suffer along with him by making me stay on the phone all god damn day as if i’m some toll free mac support line.

Turns out there’s a bit of a snag with some of the core duo iMacs. The airport cards are going all freaky as per this discussion. You get atrocious speed from it, we tried everything, tinkering with the router, trying different encryption modes, all sorts, took hours. In the end the only fix we came across, if you can call it a fix, is to drop the router down to 802.11b only. Hmm, nice.

Funny thing is, as I was helping my brother out, searching the net for answers I discovered that things at my end were downloading freakily fast. Turns out my line has finally been upgraded to 10mbit! Woohoo! Now thats what I call a pleasant surprise. Telewest have been upgrading everyone who was on the 2mbit or 4mbit tarrif to 10mbit region by region since the new year. I’d almost completely forgotten about it it’s taken this long to reach me. Not that id complain, it’s a free upgrade.

God these downloads are fast, i’m surprised at how stable it is as well. Yikes. What was phase 1?

UPDATE:
Apparently it’s sorted now and he’s got it working on g. He moved the router, i guess the iMacs airport is just a little bit sensitive (or should that be un-sensitive). Still, there are a lot of ppl having problems with it over at apples discussion site.

I’ve run xbench on my iBook, and this page compares my results with those of a core duo mac mini. I figure that the new mini’s will be more or less similar to the upcoming “macbook” (if that is what they will be called) performance wise, so might make an interesting comparison.

A lot of the tests are crazily faster on the core duo and some scores look impressive, but I doubt would offer anything noticeable to the user. Things like the thread test. Oh and memory speeds, i’ve seen this a lot on the pc world, changing motherboards that use much much faster memory but end up not actually offering any noticeable improvement when doing things. I.E. Going from DDR to DDR2 dual channel, you just don’t feel it.

Of things that do matter, the floating point test is almost twice the speed! I Wonder what “computation” actually measures ‘cos it whips my g4’s ass.

Unfortunately, it looks like i’m right to be pissed that they’re still using wanky HD’s in the mini though. The overall HD performance is basically the same as my iBook, which is so so not good enough. In fact my iBook gets 1 point higher. Thats silly.

UPDATE:
I’ve had a further play with the xbench results site and have come to the conclusion that their HD tests are flawed and completely inaccurate. According to them my ibook’s HD even beats some iMac Core Duo’s, hmm I don’t think so somehow.

lol, here’s an interesting one.