Though I really don’t particularly like writing about hardware in my blog, I provide some updates on my current hardware situation. Some years ago, I wrote a short series of blog posts about my iMac. That was a first series machine and I criticized lack of support for scientific software. This is partly related to GMP not being too much collaborative (as it appears they did not have intel macs, bac in the day).
Of course those problems have been entirely solved quite soon. I suppose that by the end of the year they were no more and the faster intel chips were just the right choice for everyone. A couple of years after those events I bought a MacBook Pro 15” laptop and that became my main work machine. Among the things I really liked best about the intel processor (and all the lovely virtualization software packets out there) was that I could run Linux in a virtual machine. Since I did not stop working on a certain “almost-linux-only” project, that was really good (and saved me from ugly partitioning). Although I had a Parallels license (which I used on the iMac), I preferred to use the simpler VirtualBox. Back in the day, Parallels did not support Linux exceptionally well and I could just live with the free VB. And that is the machine I used (along with the iMac) for my M.Sc. dissertation.
4 years after i first turned it on, my iMac blew off. Well, not literally. I suppose I can fix it, however, I chose to buy a new Mac. This time it is a MacPro. Essentially, I hated that if I thrashed my iMac (because of other damages) I could not save the monitor. So I chose a monitor-less computer. Essentially the thing is powerful. It is extremely evident when encoding my CDs into mp3’s. I don’t do much video editing.
Nonetheless, Parallels is completely capable of sucking all the resources. I had to stop using it, since the MP became useless. I suppose it may be related to having only 3 GB, even though the iMac had only 2. If I will need a virtualization software, I suppose I’ll go with VMWare or VirtualBox. But… that is not the last machine I bought.
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