Reply 60 of 132, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
I use my Mac G5 towers every day, even to the point of doing scientific work running Octave & a lot of image editing / processing on them. Also fine for general browsing / forum posting / Youtubing / etc. I have one at home and one in my office. I don't really consider 2GHz+ dual-CPU machines with 4 & 7.5 GB of RAM to be particularly obsolete though, even if they are over 10 years old.
wrote:I used a 486DX4-100 for far too long because it was the only machine I had with an ISA slot to accommodate my GUS classic for using Impulse Tracker. I never learned to use Modplug or Fruity Loops or even a MIDI sequencer. Even acquired a copy of Reason with the intention of moving over to that but never used it. I think I stopped writing music in 2003.
My main audio production workstation, which I purpose-built in 2013, is a P233MMX industrial-PC running Impulse Tracker. I use it as a sampler & MIDI sequencer to control hardware synths. (I should do a post on it sometime...) Its AWE64 & GUS PnP output straight into the mixer along with the rest of my gear. For multi-track recording I use ... one of the G5 towers.
Something to be said for building a machine that does the job you want perfectly and then just leaving it. Sometimes I think 90% of "upgrades" people do are completely pointless.
When I did my undergrad in the early 2000s I had a Thinkpad 365ED which packed a 5x86/100, 24MB RAM & 524MB HDD. I carted it all over and did a ton of schoolwork on it. It ran Win95 and an early version of Matlab (5.3???) and even had wifi via a PCMCIA card, although wireless networks weren't very common yet. Web-browsing was totally doable on whatever release of Opera was around then - I think 4 or 5. I had a better desktop at the time but nothing beats portability for an overworked student! (I still have it & use it occasionally BTW. It's no less capable now than it was back then.)
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!