mindflayer.net

Even though I am in the field, the pace of computer technology still often amazes me. (Is it the pace of progress or getitng older and years seeming to fly by faster?) The G5 Dual 2Ghz I bought nearly 3 years ago that crushed everything else at its price point in Photoshop and video encoding is now handily beat by my 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro and the quad core 2.4Ghz Q6600. The workhouse seems ready for the pasture.

That seems… sad. I know, I know, it is just a computer. However, after months of saving for the vaunted G5, finally getting that big box home was like Christmas. It has been a great computer and still is quite powerful.

Therein lies my quandary – that power comes at a cost of power. According to Apple, the Dual 2Ghz G5 idles at 140W and pulls down 640W at load. That is a very warm 2060 BTU/h at load (410 BTU/h idle) that is dissipated into my home office which translates into more cooling and therefore more power consumed. For a machine that I want to stay powered on as much as possible, this is just too much energy consumption. In the hopes of decreasing my ecological footprint a bit, I started shutting down or putting the G5 into a full sleep, which meant I no longer had that always-on central hub I wanted.

I noticed I was doing most of my photo editing and all of my email, research, documents for work, IRC, and Web work on my Macbook Pro over the last two months. Video encoding – like TiVo2Go – is being done on the Q6600, which is then shut down when not needed. The very things for which I bought the G5 are now being done on other machines.

So, today I started the move to using my Macbook Pro as my main computer. I bought a larger hard drive, installed, cloned, and moved all of my documents, music, and photos over, and shut down the G5. Next step is to rework the cabling so my Macbook Pro is easily hooked up to the LCD.

We’ll see how it goes over the next few days. There are a couple of things I will still want that won’t be met my the portable:

• A central media hub that my wife and I can use for iTunes, iPhoto, and anything else that comes to mind. I’ll rsync the data from this Macbook Pro over, just as I was doing from the G5 to the laptop.
• A machine I can leave on 24×7 with just the LCD and hard drives spinning down to act as a bounce host both into and out of the house.
• Guest computer with an easier to use UI than GNOME.

The iMac uses a maximum of 200W and the Mac Mini a maximum of 110W. Since I won’t be putting these machines under load as much, their power consumption should be much lower. (That was another weird thing – ghost processes driving the G5 into full blast mode. Seem alleviated with Leopard.) Of course, I will have to part with the G5 so I can buy a solution there.

It’s just a computer….