I would like to thank everyone once again for all their donations, without your help this wasn’t possible. You really make all the effort I’ve put in it worthwhile and I hope that I can keep giving you what you are looking for.

I bought the 1.66 Ghz Core Duo machine with 512 Mb memory, 60 Gb Harddisk and combo drive. I’m planning to use this machine as my workstation, as it is the fastest machine I currently own. I’m thinking of exchanging the optical drives from my G4 and the Intel. This will give the Intel a SuperDrive and leave the G4, which will go into server-mode with a combo drive.

The next goal for the donations is getting a 2Gb memory expansion for the Intel mini. 512 Mb is not enough to run everything smoothly as I’ve read in several forums. There was still some money left in the donation pot so the next target is going to be 250 Euro for the 2 Gb dual channel memory extension.

Here are some pictures of the new mini:

Still in the box

Everything out of the box, neatly arranged

All mini’s, and firewire disks, neatly arranged on the desk. The one on the left is the new Intel mini, the middle one is my current workstation and the one on the right is the server which serves all my mail and web sites.

The Intel Core Duo version make it (Apple claims this) 4 to 5 times faster than the G4 version. This means that all the UNIX based server programs have two CPU’s they can use. This means that you can have Apache http daemons distributing themself over the two cores to even the load. If you got slashdotted it wouldn’t have to be such an issue anymore (I hope!). The mail server consists of many different inter-linked programs as well to really benefit from a multi CPU machine.

The extra memory slot allows you to increase the internal memory to 2 Gb which is wonderful. You could load your database, static pages or your images onto a RAM disk to really speed things up. The memory itself is faster kind as well. This means that the web server performance improvement can increase much more than just the speed increase of the CPU and I’m guessing here but it could be 10 times faster than the older mini.

To handle this performance increase this mini is outfitted with a gigabit ethernet port for blazing network speeds. If you have it running in a co-located environment you can access all that available bandwidth without any problem. Both models now come included with the Bluetooth and Airport Extreme wireless capabilities.

The only drawback I can see now is the increase in the price. The extra 100 or so dollars make it just that harder to justify. It’s still very beautiful, nothing changed there, and it’s still cheap to run as it’s energy efficient (but 15 watts less than the G4).

I hope when someone has bought one he/she will tell me how much faster it runs the web and mail environment and if everything still is as easy to compile and install as I described for the G4 version. I hope it will as most is compiled with the installed compiler but you never know if there are issues before you really try it. I would buy one myself but I just recently bought my second one and buying a third is a hard sell to the family.

What I can do is reserve all the donations you make and all the AdSense income generated by this site and double that myself. So for every dollar you give by donations or by clicking on the advertisements I will add a dollar out of my own pocket. I will buy a mini Core Duo from that money and happily document all differences and how to use it as your web and mail server and what is more to come.

I think a better test would be to test more than one application at the same time, running on the same Imac to get a better comparison of the speed increase. Because if you are rendering in iMovie you can’t really do anything else on a single G5, while on an Intel Core Duo you have another processor left over to do other things for you.

This is all a theoretical thought excercise as I don’t have any Imac to test my thesis on but I do hope that someone who has access to both machines will give this a try and get some real world numbers.

Update:
Found a test on ArsTechnica where they tested an universal binary of Xbench on both types of Imac’s. There you can see in the Xbench results that the increase in speed is more like 2x than the 10% claimed in the test by Macworld indicated above.

Update:
Just heard on the Maccast podcast that MacSpeedZone.com agrees with me. They tested running parallel apps as I suggested and the results awesome.

Happy, happy, happy…..

Yes it is one of the newer 1.5 GHz models with faster harddrive and more video memory. Lucky me, the faster hardrive and processor will make the server just a fraction faster for no extra money.

Next up, getting everything installed to get it running as a server and recheck my compilation notes.

I’ve gotten myself a cheap external firewire enclosure to use the extra harddisk from my PC which I don’t really use anymore. The only time I switch it on is to get some files I didn’t copy the first time around. The firewire disk is a really usefull tool when having a Mac, you can use it to backup your personal every day or store some of that data that just clogs up your system disk.

My main reason to get one is that I now can have more installations of OS X running on my computer. It’s just a matter of selecting the correct bootable drive at startup to switch my environment. It’s really usefull to get a clean install without losing all your data and still be able to test my installation procedures.

I just found a great article on Make: which describes how you can modify you Nano by altering the Firmware. Just get you HEX editor out and start changing. I haven’t tried it myself due to lack of iPod but will give it a go, as you can change names, pictures and even the font. In this manner you can really personalize your iPod without really damaging it. Which makes it easier to sell your iPod when a newer, bigger (memory not size), better one is released in a few months.

I quickly ran into the solution which was indeed a configuration change in Firefox:

• Go to “about:config” (i.e. type it in FireFox’ address field)
• Set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0

If you do this you will notice that you will stay on the same page when scrolling horizontal and even better, the pages moves horizontal when it’s wider than your browser window, just like in Safari.

Because I still had a very old Eizo 21″ CRT which I bought a long time a go second hand it was also time to get myself a new monitor, and did I splash out there, I went for the 23″ cinema display. I’m sitting behind it now for a complete afternoon after buying it and I love it. The wide screen with 1920 pixels is magificent, you can have 2 or 3 apps running next to each other and have a complete overview. The only drawback is that it isn’t height adjustable, but I solved that by putting the stand on top of the Mac mini. The base on which the monitor rests is has almost the same footprint as the Mac mini, which in turn becomes even more invisible.

I also bought myself a mighty mouse, as I did like the scroll wheel and the 2 mouse buttons on my PC. I’m using it now for a full afternoon but what I disliked mostly is that to engage the right mouse button you really have to remove your fingers from the left hand side of the mouse or it won’t work.

But all considered I’m one happy computer user…