While I will miss AutoCAD and Photoshop, I had not actually used them for much of anything in years.
What I have gained, is desk real-estate!
That tower and the two monitors took up a lot of space.
I should be able to run a second monitor from any of my Ubuntu laptops.
I'd long since stopped using the drives on the Mac for primary data storage. Technically, the data is still on the hard drives. I have several ways to read those if I need to.
PS: I am much less upset about the machine's death than I expected to be.
Maybe because it'd become progressively less useful as time went on and neither OS was safe to have online anymore.
You might be able to put the hard drive from that tower in an external case and be able to boot it up from another machine. Drivers, especially for things like video cards might be an issue. Another possibility might be to convert the disk image from it into a VM image and maybe you could run that on something else. But yeah, it is understandable to eventually get rid of dead weight and re-purpose hardware to systems that are being actively used. Running an unsafe legacy OS under a VM does slightly reduce the risk, as does in general just keeping it offline except when actually needed.
ReplyDeleteFWIW. I lost access to AutoCAD years ago when the Sun workstations I had became non-viable. Like 25 years ago. Of course I was never into it the same way, being that I mainly used it for development work back in the day. And I never had PhotoShop except a very ancient version on a Mac, I think might have even been a 68k unit, which really puts it back in time.
What I've found really annoying recently is that I have an Android tablet that still works perfectly fine except that it can't be upgraded or even connect to any Google apps anymore, not even to update things like Chrome. I have an old Intel based iMac that also has similar problems, it can't be used to browse even anymore because the SSL version on it is no longer supported and it can't be upgraded any further. I only keep it because I have a bit of old hardware for obscure purposes that works with it and I haven't bothered to try to find out if it can work with newer hardware.
-swj