Switcher’s Log, Part 5: Man does this machine scream.

For those who are following this narrative, this is a continuing narrative of my experiences after having switched from Windows XP to Mac OS X. One of my big concerns before switching to Mac was that it was going to be sloooooow. Of course this is an unfair comparison, between:

• a 2GHz Pentium on a 2 year old Dell with 1 Gig of Memory and

• a brand new G5, 1.8 GHz x 2 (dual processor), with 2 Gigabytes of memory.

But you wouldn't believe the rumors and legends out there about Macs being slow, or the fact that you can't compare a Pentium MHz to a G5 MHz… I was worried : perhaps the Mac OS was slower or different; and anyway would it actually be able to take advantage of the dual CPU for day to day use? The bottom line: it screams! Builds are fast, opening apps is fast, moving windows around is fast, Ripping CDs is really fast. It's really fast!