The New G5: Week One

One week later, I’m pretty much set up. The G5 is very stable, and I believe what I’ve read that some users have left their’s on for a month or more. However, I have pushed the machine to its (512mb RAM) limit and frozen it, mostly by using three CPU heavy apps in one go, which I would never do usually. The only other time was using–you guessed it–Toast and Jam. There still seems to be some problems in these apps, one between knowing what to do with an external burner set up, and with burning mp3s straight to CDR, encoding to AIFF on the fly. Much easier, I’ve found, is to save as a disc image, then burn. This actually turns out to be faster than the former way. Toast/Jam does not take kindly to Force Quit, which I think is the app coding, not the Mac. Is there a good open source burner with the versatility of Jam? Let me know.
I think it only took a day or two to accept OSX as the system of choice over OS9 (duh, no shit, said my friend Gene). Things I love: 10.3’s Finder windows, allowing easy dragging and dropping and transferring/copying of files. This is such an obvious way to do an interface it’s taken nearly 20 years to come to it. Found that my PCI card won’t work because these two top G5 models have PCI-X inputs. D’oh! I also got my IDE-to-USB cable in the mail ($4 plus a ridiculous $12 postage from eBay, but it was the cheapest on the web), so I can hook up my old secondary drive to the computer and back up my files.
I never used to use OS9’s assigned folders (Applications, Documents, etc.) but find that in OSX it is the obvious choice. This is probably due to the Finder window meaning I never have to go to my desktop to find things. On OS9, that was where all the action happened. Now it’s elsewhere, either in Finder or the Dock. Also: I love F9 (Expose! Woosh!) and F11 (Desktop! NOW!)
I have yet to find a working P2P app or a FTP app that allows connection to some sites I go to. None of the newsreaders I’ve tried connected, but then again, I don’t usually use a newsreader, so I’m most probably doing it wrong.
Finally, .divx, .avi, and those horrid .wmv files work on my computer. Yay! Files come in with the correct filetype/creator. Wow!
I went through my Case-logic books and realized that the 30 or so installation discs inside I will never need or use again. It kind of hit me there. Wow. Time to rearrange some stuff.
Successfully burnt a DVD (fast) though I have had a few coasters. I again suspect this to be Toast stupidity, as it happened when I wasn’t lavishing attention on it, and it is a needy little bastard of a program. I also have encoded a DVD from an old VHS of mine. I set the encoding rate high and it took 3.5 hours just to encode the m2v. This was a 98 minute movie of course, but does that seem long?
I’ve noticed the G5’s speed while using Photoshop, which is designed for dual processor use. Very few fingers were drummed here, I tell ye.