Spring Cleaning with SSD

Solid State Drives are an expensive way to give longer life to your PCs - as it did with my 2008 iMac

Earlier this year, I set about resolving some long standing issues with my 2008 iMac by giving it a spring clean fresh install with Mountain Lion.  It removed a lot of build issues and legacy OS files from my iMac given its original Leopard install. And while I was happy with a return to its original snappiness back in 2008, I was still weighing up upgrading over the short term to the 2012 iMacs for even better performance.

Faced with choices for upgrading and adding new tech and gadgets in the coming year, it occurred to me that there may be a a more effective route to getting more bang for the buck on the iMac front.  Cut a long story short, I identified OCZ as one of a number of recommended vendors to use in upgrading the iMac disk drive.

The choice ultimately came down between the DIY approach (with various downside risks for open heart surgery on the iMac without the necessary equipment and dust-free environment) and using a Apple Maintenance provider to perform the work.

Ensuring I took a clean back up with SuperDuper!, this was a relatively straightforward exercise and I had the machine back in few days.

Since restoring data and reinstalling my applications, the value of its performance is not found in benchmarks such as GeekBench, which still rates the 64-bit iMac the 4500-4800 range. With machine start up in less than 20 seconds, applications loading in less than 3 seconds mean a far better snappiness and overall satisfaction of using my iMac. It also increases the life to the machine ahead of being able to handle the forthcoming OS X 10.9 Mavericks release, with its focus on more performance and user based enhancements.

Upgrading the iMac to a 2012 and beyond release is now unlikely to happen for another 12-24 months at the very least.

Recommendation?  Put SSDs in any old PC you night have if you want to prolong its life. Not the most original article I've posted, but worth spelling out the experience and the benefits to readers thinking about it.

If you're me, the Chromebook Pixel is a good thing

Chromebook Pixel - a truly stunning screen and laptop build

Learning in our field is often not just about the stuff we read and absorb.  It's about seeing things via our own eyes, with our own direct experience and forming a view.  In that circumstance, some people will agree  with something you write because they relate directly to your point of view and others will disagree because of a whole bunch of things, including the simple fact that their needs and motivations are different.

The Chromebook Pixel, released by Google completely somewhat left-field in February 2013,  is one of those products which I suspect divides opinion in regards to the when and how you use it, where it makes sense, how much it costs and what's its  value in the consumers eyes.  If I remember correctly, Chrome OS has been around as long as Android has, and to be honest, up to now I'd never had any real interest in it.  Until of course, I saw and heard about the Chromebook Pixel (hereafter, Pixel).

In my usual lusting after consumer tech, I wondered - what if there is a machine which I can use which relies completely on web apps (very limited local storage), has a constant web connection and would enable me to do all my key stuff? And basing the solution on Chrome OS and the Pixel as the PC end-point, could I make the cloud and social side work completely with Android in the form of my HTC One or Nexus 4?

Given I'm a predominant Mac and iOS user, with an increasing love of Android devices, the challenge was too tempting to ignore. So I can gladly say, that over the next few weeks and months, I'll be running Chrome OS and Android products side by side and seeing how this works against my Mac and iOS combination. I'm rather excited by this, 'cos right now, as I'm typing this blog post - the Pixel truly is tremendous hardware and a fabulous screen, which has touch capability when I'm feeling lazy or want to use it more like a tablet.  Obviously, I'm using the Blogger tool and with the eye-watering 2560 x 1700 display (which is higher than the Retina on my MacBook Pro), it feels a very compelling solution for blogging indeed (despite the eye-watering price).

Whether, this covers all my required situations (IT folks call these use-cases), then we'll just have to see how this all settles down after I get through this honeymoon period.

I'll post back soon.