A New Machine

No, I didn’t get that dual-2GHz G5 that I’ve had my eyes on for the past few months — getting rear-ended back in July and having to buy a new car sorta nipped that dream in the bud. But I did install an additional 512 MB of RAM into the ol’ iMac, and upgraded it to Mac OS X 10.3 (aka “Panther”), so it’s kind of like having a new ‘puter.

It’s a real thrill to be able to run more than 3 programs simultaneously. Before, just running Internet Explorer and BBEdit together was enough to slow my little baby to a crawl. Now, it screams… or at least as much as a 500 MHz G3 can.

As for Panther, I’m really digging Exposé, all of the little bits of eye candy are nice touches (launching an app and seeing that opening animation for the first time was enough to make me drool), and I’m getting acclimated to the new Finder. And, as an added bonus, I’m now using Safari v1.1… which, in addition to already being an outstanding web browser, now sports one really cool ability.

Sadly, I think the driver for my wireless USB adapter is wreaking havoc with my system, so I either need to pray that the manufacturer releases an update soon or I need to get a really long network cable.