- Photoshop is going through a series of actions, including scaling, on a batch of photos.
- iTunes is playing music.
- GraphicConverter is compressing a huge stack of files one at a time, automatically.
- I'm using a different copy of GraphicConverter to sort images.
- iMedia Converter is converting a DVD.
- And of course I'm on the web, twit, email and such like normal.
- And I'm writing (after being done with the image sorting).
[Update: Seemingly the only thing that will slow it down, or some services anyway, is very heavy downloading. If it's downloading a couple of files from a very fast server, that will make web browsing quite slow.]
(And the Mac Pro barely gets warm either. The G5 I had before, even under a much lighter work-load, would turn up the fans so loud that it was unbearable.)
------
By the by, on the iMac in the living room, I'm also converting DVDs. Those are the astonishing number of American ones I have. I have set the iMac's optical drive to "Zone 2". (What is odd is that when it's set to the wrong region, sometimes I can rip a DVD, sometimes I can't, and sometimes many strange problems just turn up.)
DVD region seems to be enforced by the DVD Player software on the Mac. Try going to "CDs and DVDs" in System Preferences and deselect "Open DVD Player" under "When you insert a video DVD." It helped here.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to watch your US DVDs on a region 2 player, the easiest thing to do is to unlock it. It's just a code that you press on the remote and it becomes an all-regions DVD player. I thought it wouldn't work but it did and I'm watching all my US kaiju-eiga (US versions of Japanese monster movies and TV series) on a region 2 Samsung player.
ReplyDeleteOh, I have at least two players which can play region two discs, that's not the issue.
ReplyDeleteMB, I discovered that too, and it seemed it solved the issue, but then all these weird problems came up, which disappeared when I made it a region 2 drive. (And it's not just the player, it's related to the drive also.)
Before OS X 10.3 or thereabouts, you could hack it to become region-free, but it seems those days are gone.
Know what you mean about multi-tasking :-) Most people (probably myself included) have no real conception of what a modern day PC is actually capable of, even without being pushed.
ReplyDeleteSeveral years ago I read a fascinating book about electronic warfare, essentially the role and use of computers in the warzone.
This was several years after the first Iraq conflict, and they were already able to give out quite a lot of specific information that was already in public domain.
What stunned me at that time was when they began talking about the air sorties flown by the 'Allied' forces during that campaign ... from memory almost a quarter of a million of them ... and they were ALL co-ordinated using a PC with a spec that had been vastly outstripped by the cheapest desktop that I could buy at that time of reading!
Many years ago, somewhere around the time when Gods dog was a puppy, I worked in a computer environment with big IBM mainframe computers, one of the biggest installations in the UK at that time (I'm still actually only talking very late 70's, early 80's)
Apart from controlling a multi-national telecommunications network, this beast of a machine also effectively ran a large Anglo - American company, running accounts, R&D, invoicing, stock control, manufacturing,payroll etc ... on a massive 4MB of RAM ... yes thats four MEGABYTES, not GB (of which there are 20 installed within PCs that are within my reach!)