Apologies for another "Hooray for me! I got a new Mac" thread.
I have been waiting for an insurance settlement to come through for my PowerBook. After two (!) months, they have finally sorted it out.
Here is the annoying thing. A couple of days they told me they are happy to pay out and due to the hassle of the claim, they were going to pay the full insured amount. Now, the equivalent model Powerbook these days is around £1500. I had my machine insured for £3000 as that is close to what it cost me when I bought it a few years back. I was happy with just getting back the replacement value but when they told me they were going to give me the full £3000 I was, understandably, ecstatic!
They told me to go and buy the machine of my choice, bring then invoice in and they would cut a cheque for anything up to £3000. I was a little cautious about this due to their past performance with the claim so I went and got a quote for a Quad and some extras and took it to them. The guy said that it would be fine and made a copy to send up to the head office. I got a call later that day to say that no, they would only pay for the replacement value, which they put at just over £1600. Now this is what I expected from the beginning but to be told this after they said they would give me the full amount was annoying. The scary thing is, what if I had done what they told me to do and went and spend £3000+ on a machine, dropped the invoice in and then they tell me, "Sorry, we are only giving you £1600".
Anyway, I am not worried as I am getting what I rightly deserved out of the policy. I am happy they are paying the full replacement value so that's good.
Second part of the story is what machine to get. Now I "only" had £1600 to go towards it, I couldn't really afford the Quad. So I looked at a DC 2.0 but it takes a while for them to get me one with a 7800 GT in it. I am doing a lot of Motion projects for work at the moment so that is quite important. I have been using a DC 2.3 with the standard 6600 in it at work and it is good but still lags a bit trying to play real time. I also want to do a lot of Aperture work.
I thought about an ex-demo DP 2.5 with an ATI X800 XT GPU but that was still going to cost a fare bit. Despite being a great and still very quick machine, it would have been a slightly strange thing to drop that sort of money on a machine with no PCI Express.
I talked to my new accountants and it has finally been explained to me clearly what buying a machine through the business really means to my back pocket. Bottom line is, I can afford a Quad!
So, I just ordered the only Quad my local preferred retailer has in its dealer network stock. Quad 2.5 G5, 512 MB RAM with an extra 2GB for the time being, everything else stock except for a 500GB HDD. Ordered from another place a new Formac 20" Raven Xtreme display which has been reviewed well and it is only £340. I wanted the extra vertical resolution over a 20" widescreen but I'm not willing to pay for the Apple 23" or 30" and didn't want to spend too much money anyway as the new Dell displays (including a 30") should be out early in the new year which I may look into.
I don't really want the 500GB drive though. Firstly, I didn't want to spend the money on it and secondly, I am a little wary of having that much data on one drive (I probably shouldn't be, but I am). I have a 1 TB RAID-5 downstairs on my HTPC as well as a couple of external FW drives so storage is not much on an issue.
I am thinking I might want to sell the 500GB drive and chuck in a Maxtor (now Seagate I guess since they bought Maxtor the other day) Maxline 300GB which gets good reviews for speed. I think I should be able to get £200 plus for the 500GB on eBay or something. A Maxline 300GB should cost me under £100, so the rest can go towards buying Applecare later on or something.
So that's my story. Not sure if it's interesting but hey, it was a good way to spend the past ten minutes at work!
Oh yeah, I get it all tomorrow! Should make a change from the 17" iMac G5 I currently have at home. Christmas has come early for jebjeb
Just a left over from when I first needed some tunes over here in the UK. Normally does duty in the kitchen with a Squeezebox wireless audio player hooked up to it.
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