Computers:

My employer's internal computing arm finally upgraded my desktop machine at work from a February 2000 issued PowerMac G4 (500Mhz, 256MB, 25GB, Zip100, DVD-RAM, ATI RagePro) to a brand new PowerMac G5 (dual 1.8GHz, 512MB, 160GB, SuperDrive, GeForce 5200). So far the largest noticeable difference has been that the firewire ports work (the old machine's firewire controller burned out years ago) and backup/restore to an external firewire/usb drive is much easier and faster. I have a Terminal.app saved session with about a dozen Terminal windows (one for each of the UNIX and Tandem hosts I routinely log into), and they all come up much faster than on the old machine.

At the moment I am simply running the cloned copy of Mac OS X 10.3.9 I had on the old G4, but eventually I'll re-install from scratch to see if there are any benefits from optimization for dual G5 processors. I have no plans to upgrade to 10.4.x (Tiger) because I use a few applications that are not "Tiger-ready" yet, and because the new OS offers me no compelling reasons to upgrade. I'll need to get more memory because of a bit of crapware they make us use at work called "Argus" which likes to have a few gigabytes of free memory to run properly (groan).

The G5 is really quiet. I can't hear it at all (but so was the G4/500 except for it's disk drive). The loudest thing in my office is still my trusty old SGI O2 workstation. The G5 is taller than the G4 was, which is an issue as it does not fit under my desk the way I'd like it to. I don't think I will miss the Zip drive that much - I have not used it in over a year anyway. I am using the built-in secure erase function in OS X 10.3's "Disk Utility" application to completely erase my old drive before I re-image it with internal computing's scratch install.