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 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.

Beginning last year, Dani's Dad has been using new Intel-based Mac Pros, one at home and one at his office. Stock, except for tripling the RAM, he installed Parallels so Windows XP 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, Dani's Dad went back to Windows on his home machine, albeit Vista, which looks more and more like OSX. He still uses the Mac Pro at the National Building Museum.

He built an Intel Core Duo speedster, using an Extreme chip with 4 GBs of RAM, dual nVidia graphics cards, dual 150GB 10,000 rpm SATA hard drives, Vista 32-bit, and so forth. Much better, get the work done and get back to doing other things. Then he converted to 64-bit XP and back to 32-bit Vista. He will do it again (after the next Dani's Duds sale) but will return to SCSI, use one or even two Intel Quad chips, 8 GBs of RAM, but with 64-bit Vista. As with motorcycles, computers are never fast enough for him...

Dani's Dad uses an assortment of software packages running over Vista: Office 2007, Adobe Creative Suite 3, Adobe Video Production Suite 3, and assorted smaller packages.