Twev1701.net

Nov
09
2008

Having Cake And Eating It Too (It’s Not A Lie)

On January 27, 2008, I made what is for me, a life changing decision. Did I get married? No. Did I have a baby? No. Did I get my nipples pierced? No. What I did do is was buy a Macintosh and leave the world of desktop PCs behind me. In the months that followed, I was quite happy with my decision, even becoming somewhat of a preacher-boy for the OS X platform. I had wanted a Macintosh for years, but it wasn’t until my experiences at i/o Computers that I needed to leave the PC world behind. After fixing other people’s computers for 3 years semi-full time, I was so sick and tired of viruses, spyware, the Windows Registry, legacy drivers, and root kits that I just couldn’t take it anymore. Hell, when my main rig died on me in June 2007, it took me months to look at it and to get it back up and running. In fact, it sat on the floor of my computer room for a good 3 months until I even looked at it. Once I determined it was the video card that had fried out, I ordered a new one and installed it. But by the time that happened, my main computer had been down for almost 4 months. In that time, I just used my laptop and was content with that. Plus, once my main system was up and running at full speed, I ditched it again in 3 short months for my new Mac.

Where am I going with all of this? Well, as much as I love my Mac, there are still some things I need a Windows environment for. Most of these tasks can and have been handled by my laptop, but there is one aspect that nothing but my main rig is suited to do – play games.

I brought my PC down from my filing cabinet a few weeks ago and made room for it on my desk. I hooked the keyboard and mouse up to it, something that hadn’t been hooked up in quite some time. Prior to this, the tower itself just sat on top of my filing cabinet with just a power cord and an Ethernet cable hooked into it. I was using the system as a media server for the house and accessed it via Remote Desktop. Now however, I was getting the itch to play some of the game I have, but have never played or finished. There was only one problem with this whole setup – I needed a second monitor. Leaving the world of CRT monitors behind with my Mac, I searched for a solution to share my monitor. First, I thought a simple DVI switch would be perfect. After researching the solution, I was stunned by how much they cost. For the cost of a switch to share the same monitor with my Mac and PC, I could buy a whole new monitor. I looked online to try and find the same monitor I already had so it would be a nice mirror image on my desk, only to discover that this model has been discontinued. The only place I could find one was eBay, and quite frankly, I’m not willing to buy a monitor on eBay. My last option was a manual KVM switch. Since I didn’t want to use the same keyboard and mouse between the 2 systems, I needed a KVM with a manual switch that had dual DVI inputs. Yeah, sounds easy, right? Wrong. Everything I was finding was right around a solid c-note. Being ~~cheap~~ frugal I decided I would just switch the monitor cable manually. Well, that lasted about 2 weeks before that really got old. So, last night I finally broke down and brought my old 19” CRT monitor down from the attic and hooked it up to my PC. I had forgotten how bad a CRT looks next to using an LCD for the past 11 months. But, it was a free solution, and it did what I needed it to do without constantly switching cables. So today after editing episode 21 of Growing Up Geek, I rearranged my desk to a point where I can use my Mac and my PC seamlessly.