Despite all the improvements in Hard Drive technology, they are soon to become obsolete. How do I know this? Well, it has to happen. The Hard Drive contains a chunk of metal spinning at about 5000 rpm with little heads suspended just above the surface reading and writing data using magnetic pulses.. they are fragile, power hungry and they all fail in the end. Often before failing they get noisy.

The future is the SSD, the Sold State Drive which is faster, silent, much more reliable and unfortunately still much more expensive.

SSD drives are catching up in terms of capacity, and the price is falling all the time. Within a few short years the old hard drive will be like the CRT monitor, we will wonder how the hell we ever put up with them!

I’m a Mac fan, but I use Windows too and I don’t get involved in all this Mac Vs. PC thing because actually the Mac and PC both have their strong points.

I nearly fell off my chair when, after installing Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard and connecting to my network (which has a couple of PCs on the network) the default icon for a windows machine is an old CRT monitor with the Blue Screen of Death!   This is funny, but I’m actually surprised that this icon is the default.

I have been looking forward to OSX Leopard for ages, the launch was delayed by Apple earlier this year which annoyed lots of Mac users including myself.

The installation was simple on my Macbook pro, it took about a hour to do all it’s stuff but in fairness most of that time was in the installer verifying the system prior to actually doing the update.

It’s not all good news though, my gmail email stopped working the moment the upgrade was complete.  I read online that a few others were having similar issues so I simply started using my mac.com email address and redirected my gmail so that I do not lose any mail.  I was going to do that anyway and was waiting for a good time to do it.

Overall it’s a great OS, and in particular I like the Time Machine backup bit.  I’m a huge  fan of backup, on the principle that every hard drive fails in the end and lots of my data is really important to me.  I bought a big 320gb external drive to use with Time Machine, but that’s the subject of a different post.

I will write about Leopard again when I have been using it a while.