24 inch iMacThe time has come for me to retire my trusty old PPC Mac Mini and enter the world of modern Mac computing on Intel, and of course tidy up all the computing clutter surrounding my desk at home.

My Mac Mini has served me very well over the last 3 ½ years, but it's really starting to show it's age now. More and more OS X apps are coming out with Intel only builds (eg OpenOffice, xBMC etc), and what does come out with PPC builds is really pushing the capabilities of the Mac Mini. This, and the desire to update my PC (currently running OpenSolaris) has been grinding away at my resistance for quite some time. This week, however the last straw landed on the proverbial camel's back when my screen started acting up.

It seems my trusty Samsung Syncmaster 172x is finally about to give up the ghost. It works for about an hour after booting, and then goes blank without even the power LED lit. Nothing can bring it back to life other than turning it off and leaving it for about 30 mins. It then works a treat for about 30 mins and then blanks again. And the cycle continues: 30 mins on, 30 mins off. This behaviour doesn't change regardless of whether I use the DVI or VGA port on the screen (so not a port or cable issue), nor if I use a different machine (so not a machine/driver issue). I don't think it's worth spending the money and getting it fixed (though I might bung it in the loft just in case) and buying a snazzy new monitor isn't going to magically upgrade the rest of the aging kit I've got. So lets hit both sides in one go.

So today I ordered the bottom of the range 24" iMac (with extra memory from Crucial). I didn't go for the top as it seems a bit excessive for such a high spec. I'm not going to use up all the extra disk space, and I'm certainly not going to be pushing the limits of the graphics card. I may push the CPU, but I doubt it's something I can't live with: I've been running with a 1.25Ghz PPC Mac and a 1 Ghz Intel PIII for years now after all.

Hopefully this should be with me before the end of the week and I can use the time before I come to work each day to migrate all my data across (by sticking the Mini into firewire drive mode and copying) and then get things like Virtualbox installed and OpenSolaris running on some nice new flash hardware.

Then it's a trip to the tip to off load the old PCs, monitors, keyboard, parts and speakers - I really don't think it's worth bunging them on eBay - and then the Mrs will be happy. We'll have a pretty computer (that's powerful enough for my needs) and no more "junk".