Computers & Software

Dani's Dad used to make mention of the computer equipment and software he used to create the newspaper and maintain the database and website. Since there is no longer a newspaper (boo hoo) you may bore yourself silly and read about it here on the website...

Dani's Dad has always built his own computers, preferring to choose each and every component, rather than use pre-assembled models sure to cut corners somewhere, shaving performance for corporate profit-taking. Even Macs do this, for example, they quit using SCSI hard drives many years ago. Otherwise, Macs are superbly built.

Beginning last year, Dani's Dad had been using two of the new Intel-based Mac Pros, one at home and one at his office at the National Building Museum. Stock, except for tripling the RAM, he installed Parallels so Windows (Vista on one, XP on the other) would be available. These are fine machines, OSX will do most anything needed, he seldom had to go to the Windows side. But he found that Macs do it in a different way from Windows, not all that conducive to getting work done quickly.

This is hard to describe, and is highly subjective, based on look and feel and taste. Pretty much neither platform does anything the other can't, just does it differently. So, with a bit of disgust after using them for well over a year, Dani's Dad went back to Windows alone on both his main computers. Then Parallels 4 came out, and back to a Mac he considered.

Instead, he built Intel Core Duo speedsters, using Extreme chips with 8 & 12 GBs of RAM, dual nVidia graphics cards, dual 22-inch monitors, dual 300 & 150GB 10,000 rpm SATA hard drives, Windows 7 64-bit, and so forth. Much better, get the work done and get back to doing other things. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is now partially 64-bit capable. As with motorcycles, computers are never fast enough for him...