YEARRGHGHH - Mac Pro at home, and I'm stuck at work

[dogbait]

After debating, racking my mind, and looking at my bank balance in gloom (it's all good now the Mac's here ) I picked up my first Mac yesterday evening from my local Apple Store: A Mac Pro with 2x 2.66Ghz CPUs, an X1900XT graphics card and bluetooth+WiFi goodness.

They were finishing building it after the store had closed, so my family and I had the entire Apple store to ourselves. My sisters and mum found the distortion effects in Photo Booth hilarious enough to occupy them for an hour (if you have iSight get that application, it's so much fun).

Anyways, didn't have time to do more than power it on and install updates before having to power it off for bed. Now at work, I'm finding it hard to concentrate...I thought Macs were supposed to make you more productive!!!!

 

[RichyHo]

If you've not told too many people at work about it you could always feign illness

 

[dogbait]

Heheh, it's a small startup and I'm the only one in the office today. I suppose I could head home anytime but a sense of duty and dogged determination keeps me locked to my desk. I'll post pics as soon as I get home, and check if Apple are still messing up the bluetooth wiring on Mac Pros.

 

[dmw007]

Heheh, it's a small startup and I'm the only one in the office today. I suppose I could head home anytime but a sense of duty and dogged determination keeps me locked to my desk. I'll post pics as soon as I get home, and check if Apple are still messing up the bluetooth wiring on Mac Pros.

My kind of work ethic. Put in your hard day's worth of labour and then head home to your shiny, new Mac Pro.

 

[NewbieNerd]

I also work for a small company and I hated how my iMac (which was bought for me by my then-wife-to-be as a reward for getting this job) was sitting at home going unused while I was on a crappy Linux box at work. Thankfully people are so laid back at my office that I just brought my iMac to work! Now it's hard at work everyday and will be retiring back to my home once I get a Mac Pro sometime next year.

 

[dogbait]

I could never bring any nice hardware from home to here. Even my pens get pinched by my co-workers! Someone at home just messaged me to say '(your mac smells a bit-- Millie said it smells like ozone, but it smells like a skunk sprayed in the room to me!)'

Is this that new Mac smell some other forum members are worrying about?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/297878/

 

[dmw007]

I could never bring any nice hardware from home to here. Even my pens get pinched by my co-workers! Someone at home just messaged me to say '(your mac smells a bit-- Millie said it smells like ozone, but it smells like a skunk sprayed in the room to me!)'

Is this that new Mac smell some other forum members are worrying about?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/297878/

Did they simply open the computer and smell this odor? Or did they open tit up and turn it on?

 

[NewbieNerd]

Or did they open tit up and turn it on?

Come on now, no need for dirty talk.

 

[speekez]

Haha... my new Mac Pro is at home too, still in the box while I'm stuck at work. My wife has already made use of the Mac -- by stacking a few wrapped baby shower gifts on top of the box.

Ugh, and I have to go to the shower tomorrow, too. What a bummer --- watching chicks open gifts while I'd rather be at home playing with Mr. Mac.

 

[ronni3]

I can still remember when my Mac Pro first arrived. FedEx guy dropped it off and I was surprised at how big the box was, and I was more than ready to tear it open and start playing with it, but I had to go out and pick up my wife & son and head to an indoor soccer game.

I remember while watching a bunch of 4 year olds try to play soccer, I was fantasizing about my Mac that was waiting for me at home.

 

[Lord Flashheart]

Lol, I hate when that happens. My MBP was dropped off while I was at work, the hours before I was done at work were painfully slow. Tick, Tick, Tick...

 

[dogbait]

Well, it's been a long weekend of family barbecues and nice summer weather, but in between my barbecuing commitments I did get time to spend with my new 'friend'

My first impressions are favourable (of course), everything's smooth, flawless, the Mac Pro connecting up with my two dell displays via DVI just fine (using the X1900XT, not the 7300GT). I installed boot camp on the machine to try it out, before I install everything on the Mac and use it as my main desktop.

The first thing I tried was syncing the device with my Sony Ericsson phone via bluetooth. Using iSync this took less than three minutes in total to figure out how to sync my phone (used help), pair the Mac and the Sony and then complete the sync. The bluetooth had a good range and synced all 300+ of my contacts from 30 feet away (I ran round the house while it was doing it to test its range). Peeking at the bluetooth module in the Mac showed that cables 1 and 2 were connected to the Airport module and a third unlabelled cable was connected to the Bluetooth module. I could not ascertain any other wires, the connectors to the cards looked too fragile to fiddle with.

In addition that new, slightly sweetish smell has dissipated completely, and I could not find any 'plastic' coating the machine's internals as some other people mentioned.

Running Windows XP with the 7300GT and the X1900XT caused problems with XP failing to start, so I took out the 7300GT and found to my delight that it worked in my main development PC (standard X86 Windows/Linux box) which was up until now using the onboard Intel graphics. I can run Linux at my flat panel's native resolution

I'm assuming whatever bios Apple put on their graphics cards allows it to run on both EFI and non-EFI platforms.

The Mac Pro played Prey, Doom 3, Quake 4 under OSX quite well, apart from some vertical tearing due to a lack of VSync with the X1900XT under OSX. Under Windows XP: Command and Conquer 3, Supreme Commander and Dawn of War ran flawlessly at 1920x1200. I'm impressed with just how fast this graphics card is.

I read of numerous problems on the Apple site which people were experiencing with the X1900XT and games under OSX and Windows XP. Artifacting, overheating, etc. I ran a few ATI graphics demos for several hours without any 3D glitches or the card shutting down. The graphics card however is noisy when doing anything intensive and blows out a lot of heat (I should add that it is very quiet at all other times - like when the Mac is off! ).

The mouse isn't much for games, right clicking being awkward at best, fortunately Microsoft make a perfectly nice optical mouse for $8 which is white, so I'm using that now. I'm keeping the Mighty Mouse connected as I'm sure Apple had some reason to sell this 'bar of soap'-like mouse with every one of their Macs! It might grow on me...

I'd put some Mac Pr0n of my machine up, but there are a lot of pictures of other people's Mac Pros, so I'll save us all some bandwidth! One issue I did note was that the included Apple ATI drivers did not work with boot camp and I had to resort to downloading them from ATI instead. Also, on every other boot into Windows XP I noticed an odd screen corruption at startup.





I've run driver clean and reinstalled the drivers and so far so good (touch wood). I've not seen the problem in OSX (yet), if anyone has any thoughts on what caused this to happen (bad driver install, bad graphics card, etc.) I'd appreciate it.

Right now I'm off to do some serious work and use OSX (the reason I bought this machine in the first place!). It's obscenely fast, obscenely quiet, and indecently good looking. It's also cheaper than the PC workstation it replaces, which is nice