Ordinarily, I would have posted this to my personal weblog, Random Fate, but it is currently down because of some issues related to WordPress and how it needs to be properly configured to not overwhelm system resources with the host computer. Unfortunately, I’m not enough of a guru to tell my hosting service how to fix the issue.
For almost two decades, I’ve been searching for the perfect computer. I use both Macintosh and PC programs, and I multitask like mad, frequently overwhelming the CPU of whatever computer I am using when it gets to be more than one or two years old, regardless of how state-of-the-art it was when I bought the computer. I now have a four-year-old PC desktop that has a powerful video card yet I’ve overwhelmed the CPU with how I operate, with Yahoo widgets keeping me apprised of weather, time, and system status along with an RSS reader running a news ticker (at times, but not reliably). Through “improvements” in Windows XP, most notably in the area of security, my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 CPU is overwhelmed by my attempts to web browse and play iTunes at the same time, despite the advertisements featuring the Blue Man Group implying semi-infinite processing power.
Back in 1995 I thought I might have found the perfect computer in the Macintosh 6100/66 (PC) computer, which had both the standard (at the time) Mac PowerPC CPU along with a separate plug in card that had a near-state-of-the-art (again for the time) Intel 80486DX2 CPU to run PC/MS-DOS programs. One could argue that it was among the first dual CPU desktop computers, except that the two CPUs were completely independent, each running a separate OS. I still have that computer, although it hasn’t been turned on for years. I hope to fire it up soon, even if so I can simply play some old PC games that will not run on any of my Windows XP machines.
Now, I’m being tempted by the dual-core Macintosh computers that can run both Mac OS X and Windows XP (through either Boot Camp, the unsupported Apple implementation of a dual-boot system or by running a virtual machine using Parallels). A dual-core system, or even better, a desktop with two dual-core CPUs, might finally be able to perform the multitasking that I demand of my machines.
It’s strange how our expectations change over time as capabilities increase.
technology