Keefer Madness

New Hardware at Work

// April 7th, 2008 // Apple, Computers, Personal Crap, Work

So we all finally got a much-needed hardware upgrade at work. I went from a PowerMac G5 single 1.8 Ghz (read: the original G5 machine) to a souped up, dual quad-core (8 freaking processors) 3.0 Ghz Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM. It was absolutely phenomenal how much faster it was! We’re talking night and day. A Photoshop document that before took me 10 minutes to open (literally – I’d go to the bathroom, get a drink, come back and it still would have a progress bar up), now opens without a hiccup or progress bar at all!

I had a hell of a time slowing this machine down. The only thing that seemed to tax it was Parallels. I didn’t play around with that much at all.

It should really help my productivity, with the machine waiting for me instead of the other way around. Speaking of productivity, I signed up for a free account with RescueTime (in beta currently) to assess efficiency and productivity at work and it’s been fun, interesting and educational. I highly recommend it for getting an idea of how you’re spending your days (or nights).

The image to the right gives you a little glimpse at RescueTime, but I’m really liking the data it is giving me so far, though I don’t have a perfect (nor very big) sample yet. It’s cool – you can set examples based on the sites, tags, etc. So like I have setup I want to be doing at least 5 hours of web development daily, and less than 1 hour of total iChat. It’s cool stuff, and you can tag things with multiple tags. I feel like I’m getting a lot out of it thus far.

Today wasn’t as productive as basically the whole morning, I was installing apps and getting the settings, preferences, etc. perfected on my new machine.