Hey everyone. I work an interesting set of shifts here, two 9-hour overnights where I'm required to do almost nothing. What I've been doing on these overnights is reading forum posts, listening to music, and a lot of my time has been spent on my iMac, which I bring from home, working on organizing my photos.
Unfortunately, it's snowing here in Northern Arizona. A lot. And I just can't find it in me to bring the iMac all that often anymore.
So I've been looking at possible solutions to my little problem. Possible solutions that will have me running a Mac, here at work, without bringing my iMac. Initially, I thought I might just go impulse-buy a Mac Mini or a MacBook. In two weeks, I make more than the cost of a new mini, and a mini I could leave at work and set up quickly enough to use during my daytime shifts as well.
Although I decided instead to hold off on the Mini, and thus, I come to the other potential solution, Macs that are already in the lab. This Lab has about 100 Dell OptiPlex PCs in it, and about seven PowerMac G5s.
The G5s, (dual-proc PCI-X 2.3s with 1.5 gigs of ram) can be described as "sporadically reliable" at best, and the Mac lab image pollutes my 500-meg NAU storage account with nearly 200 megabytes of supporting crap. Even more if I launch any Microsoft apps.
But what if I boot them from my own external hdd? There's at least one Lab G5 that looks like it's basically ready to set up and go as a machine to use an external hard disc on, so I tried to set it up at the start of my shift, unfortunately, my external hard disc (a firewire400 Western Digital MyBook) wasn't recognized as a bootable device.
A few too many hours later, I realize that (even though the drive's already APM) maybe it would help if I reformat the drive.
- Not cool!
So I had my roommate bring me another external, I clear it off and format it, and right now I'm copying everything (my entire photo collection) from the 750gig drive to the 360gig drive. It's an interesting process, involving "waiting for all 340-or-so gigs of stuff to copy."
If this works, I'll have a fairly reasonable solution to my Mac desires, an external hard disc bootable on the lab-G5s, that hooks up to the G5/Kb/Mouse/Monitor that are already in the lab.
If this doesn't work, I'm going to be a very unhappy camper until I can either figure out something else to do while at work, or some other time that I can use to work on my photos.
Unfortunately, it's snowing here in Northern Arizona. A lot. And I just can't find it in me to bring the iMac all that often anymore.
So I've been looking at possible solutions to my little problem. Possible solutions that will have me running a Mac, here at work, without bringing my iMac. Initially, I thought I might just go impulse-buy a Mac Mini or a MacBook. In two weeks, I make more than the cost of a new mini, and a mini I could leave at work and set up quickly enough to use during my daytime shifts as well.
Although I decided instead to hold off on the Mini, and thus, I come to the other potential solution, Macs that are already in the lab. This Lab has about 100 Dell OptiPlex PCs in it, and about seven PowerMac G5s.
The G5s, (dual-proc PCI-X 2.3s with 1.5 gigs of ram) can be described as "sporadically reliable" at best, and the Mac lab image pollutes my 500-meg NAU storage account with nearly 200 megabytes of supporting crap. Even more if I launch any Microsoft apps.
But what if I boot them from my own external hdd? There's at least one Lab G5 that looks like it's basically ready to set up and go as a machine to use an external hard disc on, so I tried to set it up at the start of my shift, unfortunately, my external hard disc (a firewire400 Western Digital MyBook) wasn't recognized as a bootable device.
A few too many hours later, I realize that (even though the drive's already APM) maybe it would help if I reformat the drive.
- Not cool!
So I had my roommate bring me another external, I clear it off and format it, and right now I'm copying everything (my entire photo collection) from the 750gig drive to the 360gig drive. It's an interesting process, involving "waiting for all 340-or-so gigs of stuff to copy."
If this works, I'll have a fairly reasonable solution to my Mac desires, an external hard disc bootable on the lab-G5s, that hooks up to the G5/Kb/Mouse/Monitor that are already in the lab.
If this doesn't work, I'm going to be a very unhappy camper until I can either figure out something else to do while at work, or some other time that I can use to work on my photos.
