Should I buy a Mac Pro?
My addiction to the latest, greatest, fastest and shiniest is well-documented. Most of the time, the urge to hop the Queens-bound N/R/W to Mecca is driven by pure technolust. However, I rationalize my decisions based on the fact that, working from home, my computer is my connection to the world, both personally and professionally. A faster computer might run Aperture faster, sure, but my virtual machine will run Windows faster, too. Viewed through the lens of professional productivity, it's usually financially irresponsible for me not to buy a new computer.
It was for this reason that I did not follow through with my initial impulse to buy a MacBook Air in January. It's an undeniably sexy laptop, but it's underpowered for my purposes. And so, my credit card stayed neatly tucked away in my wallet... until SXSW.
After attending one of the Core Conversation panels, Kathryn casually mentioned a tip she picked up from someone else who worked out of a home office. When asked how he kept disciplined when transitioning between work mode and play, he replied, "two laptops. No personal stuff on my work laptop, and no work stuff on my personal laptop. Ever."
Brilliant! I'm a world-class procrastinator who's easily distracted. A firewall between my personal and professional computers seemed like a perfect solution. Even better, it was a perfect rationale for buying a certain impossibly thin, 3 pound ultraportable notebook computer!
After living a two-laptop life for a few months, I can now say that I really should have done this sooner. Since cleansing my MacBook Pro of all non-work-related applications, it's so much easier to keep the distractions at bay. However, I've now come to realize that my work laptop isn't a laptop at all, it's a thin, underpowered desktop. Now that I have a MacBook Air, I almost never disconnect my MacBook Pro from its Cinema Display.
I give you all of this backstory so that you don't think I'm crazy when I say that, less than a year after buying a perfectly good MacBook Pro, I'm seriously considering replacing it with a desktop. But, before I go forward, I want to make sure that I'm making the right decision.
I depend heavily on VMware Fusion to run Windows XP. I haven't upgraded to Vista for a number of reasons, chief among them my concern that all the extra bloat will render my guest OS unusably slow. However, using Windows XP for remote administration of Vista computers is a pain in the ass. Backward compatibility in Remote Assistance is broken, and you can't install VNC. There are supposedly workarounds, but I haven't had the time or patience to implement them.
This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask it anyway: Can anyone tell me whether I'll see a substantial performance increase between running the (relatively) leaner Windows XP on a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro, or the more bloated Windows Vista on a (much faster) Mac Pro?
A followup question: should I deviate from the stock configuration, apart from more RAM? Is it worth the extra $800 for the extra .2GHz processor? Should I stick with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, or shell out another $150 for the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT?
Comments
The Mac Pro is really fast with tons of capability, full stop. I added 2Gb of RAM to the base config, and another 1Tb drive in the 2nd bay to act as a real-time Time Machine backup to the stock 500Gb main drive.
I run VMware Fusion on it and aside from a game or two that I've tested and didn't work, everything works great. Fusion starts super fast and you can have an instance of Vista, an instance of XP, and other instances as well (I have an ubuntu instance to test firefox on that as well).
I'd say unless you are playing PC games, go with the stock config +RAM, but if you want to play Portal or whatever, go nuts on the video card and install Vista and XP via bootcamp.