The Big Mac Mini

Today I found an interesting offer of an Acer 24" screen. Because the Mac Mini has a digital (dvi) screen resolutions of 1920 x 1200 this seemed to be a suitable match. So when I came home I was anxious to hook up my new purchased screen. 

Absolutely flawless. I was even expecting not the best image and colors for that price. But I have to admit I am really impressed. Before I used a 20" screen from BenQ with a resolution of 1240 x 1024 pixels. Not bad, but I always had the feeling that I was crammed in small spot while working with Adobe PS or Premiere. Now it feels like a big new desk came in and I can easily arrange the tools around and still have space even for a chat window with Kate. 

Furthermore, what to tell about my last month experiences with the Mac Mini? I've been running my windows PC next to it, and I discover that I am much more attracted to the flawless working little Apple. The only concern is the disk space. I have about 28 gig of space left. And I start to be concerned that it will get filled to the roof. I have 3 Lacies hanging on it so I have to figure out how to hook up all the files into one of the external drives and still have them working in the apps. It's isn't a big deal, but the thing of organizing files and keeping track of them is not my strongest quality. 

Anyway, so far I am totally impressed by this big Mac Mini. With the new screen you would wonder what big PC is behind it because the Mac looks just like a little peripheral device. I pushed the little Mac really to it's limit with Adobe Premiere, Reason, Photoshop, Illustrator, flash etc. Multitasking seems no problem at all. No hick ups no crashes nothing of the kind. Of course the speed when calculating a picture or rendering a movie is another story, for that I would need actually a Mac Pro. But then again, I won't complain for this money. When it's busy I just turn to my PC to do some other stuff. Talking about PC's, my friend Wim came over with his new purchased HP laptop. A real state of the art device. Running Vista. And of course I won't deny that Vista looks really sleek and beautiful. I know it's all make up but the inferface is really gorgeous. Though I feel really lost when I want to search for programs and files. It seems quite complicated compared to XP and Apple. Anyway, we wanted to transfer some video files to my external drive. It was almost impossible the time that it took. Next to that there is this really annoying flaw that in FAT32 you can't copy files larger then 4 gb. So I had to cut up the movie with Quicktime. And yes I've been a bad boy I cracked it to the pro version so I was able to work on it. But boy it took a while for this super machine with Vista to do this. The movie was 5,32 gb and I divided it in 2 files making it possible to copy to my external drive and then attach it into another video with Premiere. It took us 2,5 hours before we were finally ready to hook up the drive back to my apple. The more I work with Mac, Vista and XP, the more I am sure that there is no return or at least no life without a Mac..... 

p.s. what is so super cool is that I use my Sony Video cam as webcam. With all the features of course of this Sony, including the wide angle lens. Chatting was never so much fun before!