Four and a half years ago I spent an entire summer working an internship in the accounting department of a manufacturing firm in town. It wasn’t exactly awful…but it was definitely one of those life experiences that you look back on, shudder a bit, and appreciate the job you have now that much more. It also provided some pretty clear contrast when I stacked it up against my next internship(s) that became the job I have now.
Anyways, one of the tangible results of all that toiling was an Intel Core Duo iMac. At the time it was the most kick-ass iMac you could get. 20-inch screen, 2GB of RAM, and a half terabyte hard drive. I knew the Core 2 Duos would be out a few weeks after I got it, but I wanted the computer before leaving for Western and didn’t want to mess with trying to have something like that shipped to my residence hall. And for the first four years, it was a pretty stellar machine. Even after I sold my iBook G4 and got a MacBook Pro in 2008 it still felt pretty snappy, and the graphics were killer.
Then my brothers got me StarCraft II for Christmas. I knew my iMac barely (BARELY) met the minimum requirements to run the game, so I wasn’t too surprised to see graphics like this:
It made me a little sad but it certainly didn’t stop me from playing the game. And while I’m still curious to see what the game is really supposed to look like, every once in a while I run into terrible, terrible graphical artifacts that make me want to cry.
I’ve gotten graphical artifacts like crazy lately, so this doesn’t surprise me, and the worst part is that I’m getting used to it. I’ll probably be surprised when I load the game on a new machine and don’t see weird crap like that all over the place. iMac has been dying a long, slow death over the last six months, and will be the first Mac that I don’t sell someone because I wouldn’t wish to inflict this thing on anybody. My guess is that my graphics card is failing, which is causing a couple of other weird issues, but a replacement card/logic board for this sucker is $900. Intel makes a Core i7 XT processor for about that much that has three times as many cores and would rock my world.
The short-term plan is to dump this sucker in about six months and get a Mac Mini that I’ll plug into my TV for iTunes serving along with Hulu Plus. I’ll probably game on it as well, but not too seriously. The long-term plan is to build my own PC…but that’s more of a “next year” kind of thing.
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