My Macintosh computer just died
Ron Knights
Posts: 1,805
The mobile computer desk flipped over, and everything went down to the floor. I can't get the iMac to even turn on. I had spent the past two weeks reinstalling DAZ content from scratch. I don't know if the external hard drives survived. Right now I'm using my 17" PC Notebook connected to a 39" monitor for a second screen.
I just don't know how I can get a new computer. I really wanted to buy a new PC to replace the iMac. I wanted a computer that is more capable of handing DAZ Studio's requirements.
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When my Mac died (I struggled for years trying to use DAZ Studio on a G4) I made the leap to PC and never looked back.
I understand your pain and frustration you must be feeling. Best luck on retreiving data from you externals.
Try to keep looking up. Will send some prayers your way.
Thanks. I will likely dust off my ancient Macbook and see if I can copy the files over to whatever FAT format can be read by both PC and Mac. But neither the PC notebook or old Macbook are worth much.
well on the bright side you get a lot more bang for your buck buying a PC
a Ryzen 3 processor is as cheap as chips
a mid range Nvidia graphics card of at least 6GB
get a decent amount of RAM
What is your budget for a new PC? I'll spec out a system. IIRC you might not be able to assemble one yourself so you would need to find someone willing to help out.
Did you know Apple sells coffins for their computers?... Actually, I made that up, but I think they should...
Wasn't that a fairly new computer? Time flys but I think I remember you mentioning when you just got it (maybe at Hivewire?)... That kinda sucks if it was newish still... lately the years have been rushing by like so many summer fields (sorry, Jackson Browne was on the radio) and I'll be like "Dude, didn't you just buy that car?", and the other person will be like "Wha? That was like twelve years ago...?" Either way, new or old that's no consolation when a disaster takes out your computer. Can't you test the hard drives on the notebook?... unless you formatted them strictly for the Mac... it's always a good idea to format a hard drive for Exfat (or Fat32) so you can read and write on both platforms, especially if you own a PC and a Mac.
Well, I hope it's fixable... if that's something you are thinking about doing.
Good luck.
You're having a run of bad luck, Ron. I hope things turn around for you quickly.
I don't have any computer money. I live on a fixed, limited income. All the same, I looked at some computers around the $1,000 price range. They appeared to have decent GPUs, etc right out of the box. I'd want to add a 3-4TB internal hard drive to handle my DAZ Studio content. Again, I have no idea how I could get that kind of money. My iMac was 6 years old.... rapidly reaching the limits of its lifetime/usefullnes.
I was really tired of the fact that Apple just didn't want to give me the same kind of power and flexibility that I could get in a PC desktop.
My 13 year old macbook's built in display went black forever
back in march (as I was finishing the final rendered scenes of "Galactus Rising")
the track pad was killed years ago by a falling curtain rod.
But alas the Old dog lives on mostly as glorified alarm clock ( attached to an old 20 inch external monitor),
but it still runs an old non sub Adobe CS3 suite and my now(permanently ) abandoned Maxon C4D.
I Just bought a Ryzen 5 pc with a super fast SSD ,windows 10 Pro 16 gig RAM to replace my 4 year old toshiba PC,
Upgraded from Iclone 6.5 to 7.7 & CC3 Pipeline.
But that Old Mac saw me through some tough times and a six year feature film project
I will keep it up & running and let it Die peacefully of "Natural causes"
@ron just move on man.
well you won't be buying stuff from DAZ etc until you do so put that money aside each fortnight
go for walks and do some gardening buy a sketchpad
After 3 months seriously working on DAZ, I also recently gave up on the horrific slow renders on my Macbook Pro which put me to sleep (and I can hardly productively create 2-3 images per week and with much frustration to boot) and purchased my first Dell G5 laptop, a gaming machine which I assume offers better cooling functions, has 16GB Ram and NVidia 2060. Price was 25% off so came up to about US$1200 (limited resources here too). For external HDD, I use a Seagate 5TB which PnP via USB and no external power needed, only about US$100 from Amazon. Hope this helps.
Ok. on no budget you still have some options. They're not the greatest options but they still exist.
1) Dumpster diving. The days of actually having to dig junk computer parts out of dumpsters is, mostly, over. However if you can find your local e-waste recycler you could probably talk them into letting you grab a box or two for pretty close to nothing, what these guys get for recycling a PC is criminal. Get a working PC even one without a GPU and you're well on your way. You can add a GPU and storage etc. as budget allows.
2) Free Geek. If you live near one of their locations you can get a free computer in exchange for community service. They even have a program where they'll teach you to build computers and then give you one once you do 24 hours of system building. You can also just go in and see what they have cheap for sale. They do install linux on theior systems but getting a Windows key is cheap and easy.
3) Groupon, eBay and Craigslist. There are lots of deals out there on refurb PC's. The systems may be marginal by modern standards but if you just want something that will render in iRay and let you surf the web those will do it, and won't be too terrible for iRay once you add a GPU.
This computer setup looks nice. What do you think?
https://www.newegg.com/p/1VK-0022-006E3
That one is way overpriced.
While I abhor prebuilts, if you don't want to learn to build one there's better options for less. I would recommend building it, it's not that hard, but I do understand being worried about damaging parts (though as long as you don't do anything crazy that shouldn't happen)
Here's a few I'd say would be a better bet, from most to lest expensive. None of them have the 32gb of ram, but with the money you would save you could just get some better memory in that size kit, and have a better all around experience.
https://www.newegg.com/abs-mage-h-ali356/p/N82E16883102855
https://www.newegg.com/abs-computer-technologies-rogue-h-ali349/p/N82E16883102848
https://www.newegg.com/ibuypower-cb-136a/p/3D5-0007-00046
https://www.newegg.com/skytech-st-arch3-0-0056-ne-archangel/p/N82E16883289049
https://www.newegg.com/abs-computer-technologies-ali403/p/N82E16883102961
https://www.newegg.com/abs-computer-technologies-ala194/p/N82E16883102945
https://www.newegg.com/skytech-st-arch3-0-0054-ne-archangel/p/N82E16883289048
Here's a pcpartpicker list i made up real quick that would be the best of both worlds, 8gb gpu, 32gbs of ram, plenty of storage (1tb ssd and 2tb hdd) all at about $600 less than the one you linked. If you wanted you could almost get a 2080ti instead of the 2060 super for the same price as the one you linked.
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/BrimstoneOmega/saved/#view=FFywzy
I''ve built PCs in the past....over 10 years ago. Then I switched to Macintosh computers. Now I'm back to PCs!
Welcome back to the PC master race, lol.
All jokes aside, if you feel confident then by all means build it yourself. granted there is the extra steps of getting windows and drivers installed, but that's not too bad, plus you get to skip all the bloatware of prebuilts.
An easy price to pay for the savings as well as the confidence and upgrade paths it will give you.
I have no idea why anyone would think that is worth $1600
For that you can get that:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor ($171.99 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($34.97 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard ($124.99 @ Best Buy)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory ($159.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Blue 500 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($68.90 @ Amazon)
Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 6 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($152.66 @ Amazon)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB WINDFORCE OC 3X Video Card ($499.99 @ Best Buy)
Case: Cooler Master MasterCase H500 ATX Mid Tower Case ($119.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair RM (2019) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($134.99 @ Best Buy)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit ($139.94 @ Amazon)
Total: $1608.41
If you have $1600, plus tax, then the above system would be great for you.
Exactly what @kenshaw011267 said. $1600 is insane for that PC. Please, please, please do not buy that.
You can also knock about $100 off windows using this site
https://www.kinguin.net/category/19429/windows-10-professional-oem-key
I've used it quite a few times before.
brimstoneomega, I actually feel liberated thinking of finally moving back to a PC. kenswhaw011267, I've cut and pasted your suggestion for later reference. I'm sure you're right about the greater value of the home built compute
I'm having a devil of a time trying to communicate with and use this HP PC notebook vs the iMac. I fumbled around looking for a simple text editor to save notes. I found Evernote on this computer. I've had iot it for years but barely used it.
grab notepad++
Yes, it is free and powerful. https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/
...wouldn't surprise me. Several companies tried to cash in on special holders for the Apple Titanium™ card.
...the PC Part Picker option looks good. Yeah, only a 4 core/8 thread CPU but you get a Turing 2060 GPU, 1 TB SSD, 2 TB HDD, and 32 GB of memory (which has become of the norm these days. Probably need to invest in a CPU cooler but even with that it's much less than that one at Newegg which can leave you with enough for a decent external drive. (I've been looking at a WD 8 TB for 145$).
1) It's kind'a on the smallish side, is there any room for a hard drive inside? Any room & slots for additional circuit boards? Are you a tinkerer?
2) it's similar to the new system I built for myself (memory, GPU, SSD storage, Powersupply)
3) it's a lot more than $1000 but similar to the final price I paid after all my quality upgrades.
Dead computers are definitely a bummer.
My old computer is again faltering. I'm still using it for my daily life though. But like me it seems to be getting ragged at the edges. It greatly needs a complete rebuild of the OS and I'm not so sure another one of the drives isn't wigging out. (Danger, danger Will Robinson!)
Things are a bit brighter now. I reformatted one of my backup drives to exFAT, and ran DIM to get DAZ Content installed on the PC notebook. I was looking around my shelving unit and noticed my 2009 Mac Mini. I had stopped using the Mac Mini months ago because it made a loud sound.. I thought maybe the fan was dying. I figured I could at least test the external drives. The Mac Mini is happily working, and hasn't made any noise so far.
Yes, the Mac Mini only has a Core2 Duo CPU. But it works. I can continue doing the manual install of my DAZ Content! Just to be safe, I spent the last of this month's money to buy another 3TB external drive. If nothing else, I'll be able to use it on the HP Notebook.
Well... that will buy you some time... I'd start saving for the computer that Brimestone put together at PCPartspicker.
Yeah that list looks good. I've saved it.... I'm in no hurry right now.... I'm just settling my emotions and laughing at the funnier side of this latest escapade.
I give up. I was trying to copy my DAZ content over to a hard drive formatted to work with PCs. The job never finished. The Mac Mini kept heating up till it shut down. I don't have any of my work on a PC drive right now. I give up.
well if you have the internet access your DAZ stuff is all downloadable with DIM
you only need copy your other stuff over
I have several projects that I've been working on for over 20 years. I need to find a way to copy that stuff over from a Mac-formatted drive to a PC drive. I am also totally depressed because I no longer have any Mac computers. Indeed, I only have this 17" HP Windows 10 Notebook... That's it. If that dies, I have nothing left.
you have your life
we all get so hung up on possessions in the first world, houses burn down, wars come, it can all be taken away in an instant.
I was heartbroken when my video camera with my 40th birthday party on the tape was stolen a few days after by a burglar but I am 58 now, that burglar has probably died from drug related issues by now or at least lead a very miserable life or maybe they grew and became a better person, I obviously still have not moved on about a silly party with friends I no longer see and will not contribute to the great video archives of humanity in any way.
Just place your drives in a dry cupboard and wait until that day you can do something with them, I still have a couple failed 10 years old external drives that don't power up I hang on to hoping one day I can get data off them from my early days doing 3D.
Came across them the other day and moved the box as I sorted stuff!