Disaster Progress

I suppose it's only fair that I provide an update, right?

So to repair my old G4 would have been $700...and that may not even be the actual fix. So repair was pretty much out of the question. I mean, I could get a nice stop-gap MacMini for the same price or less.

So what to do?

Well, I could get the MacMini, except:
-It can't do dual displays
-It can only handel one hard drive (internal)
-It's intel (I need Adobe CS2 and After Effects, and my Final Cut is not eligible for cross-grade).

I could also get a G5, except:
-The configuration I'd really need is about $3000
-It's "last years technology"
-The Mac Pro had just been announced and the G5 seemed just silly now


So yeah, I figured the best thing to do was consider the old G4 officially retired and just invest into a new "workhorse" machine. I went to the 5th Ave store and picked up:

Quad 2.66 Mac Pro with a 250 gig HD, 3 gigs of ram and superdrive.

With my education discount, it wasn't too much more than an older G5 with MUCH lower specs, so I did pretty well.

***
"But wait, didn't you just say you can't go intel because you need CS 2?"
-Yes, but, after reading some reviews and benchmarks, I figured it would be OK, because: Even under Rosetta, the Quad Mac Pro still runs most CS 3 apps faster than my old Dual G4. The key apps, like Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects (surprisingly enough) all run without any noticable glitches. And once CS3/AFX 8 come out, this thing is going to SCREAM.
***
I'm awaiting bluetooth and airport modules (they didn't have them in stock), I ordered a secondary 320 gig HD for backup, and I have my old G4 HDs sitting in Firewire cases for a combined 1TB of storage. The Superdrive I had in my G4 (An 8X DL deal that I got online) was easily installed into the lower bay on the Mac Pro...So very little is being wasted from the old machine.

When I got back to the apartment, I was able to get all of my data off the old G4 boot drive onto the new Mac Pro drive- After a bit of messing around with permissions (Migration Assistant didn't want to transfer anything correctly, so I opted for the scarier "Log into Root, transfer data yourself and correct the permissions later"). Everything was up and running in about 3-4 hours. I spent the evening making sure everything was working as it should, and installing the new Final Cut Studio (I need it).

The next day, got right back on track and immediately completed and sent out some icons. And that's what I've been doing. Each night, I've been sitting down and completing as many as I can and sending them out right away. I've got a LOT done, and they're all being sent out ASAP. I'm confident all pending order will be completed by the end of this week.

Here is a list of pending orders, listed by initials:
KCT
MW
MT
NM
CG
SD
AEC

None of those orders contain multiple icons, so things will move very quickly.

Whew. Ok. I think that's everything.