My PC died!!!

[mbrager]

Hey Michael:
Somehow I'm not surprised at this turn of events. I've built several desktops and didn't find it that hard if you have enough patience.
I used this guide on Ars Technica: Ars System Guide: October 2009 Edition Don't go for the God Box.
I enjoyed your comments about the iMac. Hope you'll keep us informed about the next chapter. Good luck.
Mike

[Fortytwo]

bye bye imac....returned it to the store for refund and i never want to see another. Had it all set up, then bam! It went totally sideways. Was not comfortable with it or its methods. So back in the hole i go to build a real computer

wb...

[Michaelaw]

well....Chapter two starts off like this. computer store determined that a ram sim on the Mac was at fault so it was pooched before i ever got it home. You'd think that would have been caught at the plant? The smooth talking salesman convinced me to try again. The kicker is that though I didn't know it, our ops manager at the shop (A mac Guru) has his Imac running win xp along with OS X
and also Win 7 on a separate partition calling it perfect, seamless and flawless After about twenty minutes on the phone with him, I'm totally convinced that what I want to achieve with the Imac is absolutely not an issue as long as the Imac is sound. So I'm going to try again after the new one is given a clean bill of health by the store. The Store was going to set it up but I felt I'd learn more doing it myself especially after trying to fly a crippled one, that taught me a lot This time it's gonna work!!!

[Bambi]

I figured that it had to be something like that. It's nice to know that I'm right

[Michaelaw]

New Mac is a flyin HD partitioned, Snow Leopard one side, Win XP the other. Took a few days to get it tuned up but it's rockin now

[mbrager]

Excellent outcome and best of both worlds. I see you are back taking pictures as well. Nice ones.
Best. Mike

[Lovin]

I'm happy to hear the good news !

[Michaelaw]

There are still hurdles. The gamma of windows in bootcamp is hard to get ones head around. I tried Adobe gamma but it did not go well. Where PC's give you both brightness and contrast control in Windows, Mac seems to only concern itself with brightness?

[Michaelaw]

Update... One week into running windows on a formatted partition and It's clear that the Mac is not as capable at running windows XP as a dedicated PC motherboard. More program crashes in a week that I had in two years running my old box. The Apple keyboard and mouse are problematic. I lost a schwack of files during a move from one drive to another. Thunderbird crashed twice and drive performance is slow. There are a few quirks on the Mac side too with files locking for no apparent reason and being asked for my password for any system change I want to make. The right click mouse function is a poor copy of the windows function. The mac is staying but I'm reluctant to use for production at this time especially in "Bootcamp" mode as it's way too flaky. I can't afford the issues it brings to the table. My computer needs to be totally dependable as my time frames for production are often tight, I can't have the machine tell me "Data transfer failed, all files were lost" as happened this morning. I'm going to revive my quad PC by replacing the motherboard and CPU for my upcoming show so I'll have faith I will have a flawless show produced. The Mac will be formatted and run as a dedicated Mac and slowly I'll get the software I need for OS X for production. Sadly, the MAC/Windows Bootcamp deal can't be trusted at this time

[Bambi]

oh MAW! that totally sucks. Sorry to hear about your problems.