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Review the New Mac Computer Desktops – CRE RentalsDecember 17th, 2009Several times this year, most recently at the end of October, Apple upgraded and updated its Macintosh product lines. It still has its top of line Mac Pro towers, last “refreshed” in Q1 2009, but now has faster iMacs with larger screens and a potent Mac mini. (Not that it will replace the Xserve line that CRE rents, but the mini can now be purchased with Mac OS X Server installed.) The new Mac laptops are pretty exciting, too; read the MacBook Pro laptops review. Go with a Mac Pro When the Mac Pro high-performance desktops like CRE rents get their next refreshing in early 2010, they may get Intel Xeon six-core processors, according to a recent unconfirmed rumor on the Web site, Hardmac. The Core i9 chip will increase performance while decreasing power usage, or so the story goes. The Mac Pro might also have a modified motherboard with a 10 Gbit/second Ethernet port (a major increase) and support for 8 and 16 GB RAM modules (current maximum is 4GB). This allows a potential total of 128 GB of RAM. A new iMac for you? The iMac line has had two screen sizes in its modern (flat panel) version, now measuring 21.5 and 27 inches, but has new LED backlit displays with 16:9 widescreen ratio. A 21.5-inch imac rental has a high-resolution 1920 x 1080 pixel display. Movie lovers should note that the 27-inch model’s Mini DisplayPort supports bi-directional connections – just connect an HD source and your iMac is an HD monitor. The iMacs now have 4 SO-DIMM slots supporting up to 16 GB of RAM, and four different Intel processors. The 21.5-inch models can be configured with 3.06 GHz or 3.33 GHz Intel Core2 Duo processors, but the “serious fun” starts with the 27-inch iMac. It is configurable with the aforementioned CPUs, a 2.66 Quad-Core i5 or a 2.8 GHZ Quad-Core i7 processor. The two Quad-Core options take the iMac to the level of performance first seen in the Mac Pro – very impressive! Mini goes maxi The Mac mini has two new configurations: one model featuring a 2.26 GHz Intel Core2 Duo, a 160 GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM; the second has a 2.56 GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor and double the hard disk and RAM (320 and 4 GB, respectively). Both feature seriously upgraded graphics capabilities via an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset. These minis are becoming very popular as “small-but-mighty” servers especially for small businesses or for off-site, temporary offices at a convention center. Call one of our Account Executives today and find out how a Mac Pro rental or iMac rentals can help increase productivity or solve those backlog problems. Give us a call or send an e-mail, or simply fill out a Quick Rental Quote form. We are Mac rental specialists and are here to help. Build a Site, Build Your Business, with CRE Rental’s HelpNovember 19th, 2009Whether your business involves manufacturing, distribution, a profession or a service, you can build it up by creating a plan to expand your online presence.
Don’t worry about it! Web sites can cost a lot in both time and money. If you don’t have a large monitor, consider renting a LCD monitor (or two) so you or your designer have plenty of screen real estate to handle all the pages, menus, art and tools that need to be right at hand. It might be easier to start with something a tad less complex than a full-blown site, too, since you can “scale up” gradually. Glamorous corporate Web sites can cost a lot to develop. Do you really have to have a site in the first place? Probably. Does it need to cost a lot? No. Web presence is going to be important to your customers, but start out easy. You can get budget hosting plans for as little as $5 a month, and most of the offers today include everything you need, including shopping carts. If you are considering getting new software and embarking on a Web project, you might consider a computer rental (Mac and/or PC) so you can dedicate a workstation or two to the job without interfering with other work. If you anticipate having a lot of photos, audio or video material, consider some extra storage like a Xserve RAID rental. You can never have too much storage—ever! Now go get the customers Now, you need to drive traffic (customers) to your Web site. Let’s face it, if customers don’t know you’re there, you won’t have a business, no matter how nice your site or how great your product or service. You need to invest what you can, which will mostly be time plus whatever money you can allocate, in promoting your site and your business. You should devise an e-mail campaign, send press releases to print publications and online services, get trade links, create a Facebook Page, use twitter, post comments on online forums and generally sing a “one note song” about what you are doing. If you need wireless laptops for a “mobile campaign,” or plasma screen rental for a digital signage program, CRE rents all sorts of technology equipment. Whatever you need, our expert Account Executives are here to help you. You can call us, send an e-mail or fill out our Quick Rental Quote form, and the solutions you need will be on the way. That’s what we do, after all—provide the solutions that keep you going and growing. CRE Rentals Offers Tips on Web Design (Part 1 of 2)November 10th, 2009There are a few types of businesses that don’t need a Web site—really!—as well as a growing number that do business only over the Internet. Whatever business you are just starting—with a few computer rentals from CRE and a dream—you may be tasked with building a site yourself. Just how do you go about it if you’re not a design pro? Keep it simple
Whether you are testing your new company intranet with an Xserve rental, or refining the site you already have, some basic design rules will help. It is easier to warn you about common “Web site woes” than teach you good design in a couple of blog posts. We will give you 10 great tips today, and 15 more next time around, to get you thinking (then doing). 1. Some Home pages make visitors click “Enter” or “Continue” to get to the real Home page. Home should be, well, Home! 2. Don’t waste space with an array of badges, Good Housekeeping seals or other certificates. If they are important, include them on your About page. 3. Be sure to include contact information. You’d be surprised how many sites leave out the most important details, like how to reach them or store location. 4. Visitors will leave in a nanosecond if they can’t figure out, immediately, what your site is about. Tell them clearly. 5. Do not “auto play” your favorite tune. If you really do need music, put “mute” and “off” buttons in plain sight. 6. Everybody speed-reads on the Web. Use short sentences, headlines, bullet points and lists to assist readers in “finding and filtering” your site’s content. 7. Forget fancy fonts, six different typefaces or eensy-teensy 5-point type. Don’t make visitors use the zoom control (which many don’t even know about). 8. Limit the Flash animations and video clips. Pages take longer to load, and overuse can irritate people. 9. Don’t go crazy with the color scheme. Super bright or very dark colors take some skill to use correctly, so stay in the “muted middle.” 10. This is your company’s “virtual face,” so no spelling or grammatical errors are allowed. If you’re not the best writer or editor, get professional help. Above all, don’t let the Web work worry you. Just keep your cool, do some research, look at what good sites do (and don’t do) and do your best. CRE is here to help businesses, with everything from comprehensive office equipment rentals to high-powered workstations for exacting work in science, IT, the visual arts and audio engineering—as well as your bookkeeping and e-mail, of course. Whatever you need, from laptop to computers (including Mac Pro rentals), our expert Account Executives are here for you. You can call us, send an e-mail or fill out our Quick Rental Quote form online, and the solution is on its way. Blazing New Trails with Both Macs and PCsOctober 30th, 2009We are truly living in a virtual world now. Many of the best new ideas in computing and communications are technologies that transport your voice, your face, and your mouse, keyboard and touch-tone commands through cyberspace into someone else’s computer or other device. It’s all about “connectivity with control,” at least for this news cycle. PC remote control If you need help on your computer, it is now possible for someone at a remote location to log right onto your computer with you and even take control of your system. This is not some advanced, expensive add-on technology. It’s built right into Mac OS X’s iChat application, and is easily done in Windows Vista and the new Windows 7, as well. This could completely change how your company maintains its PCs. Remote operators can log on to corporate workstations to perform a remote computer repair and/or ongoing maintenance—for PCs across the hall or across the country. You can also train remote employees by taking control of their screens and showing them what to do. If you want to test all of these capabilities without interrupting any ongoing work flow, consider renting iMacs from CRE. The iMac runs both Mac OS X and Windows, so you can test all the different setups and combinations. Telephonic control Let’s say you’ve decided to host your own Web site and/or a company intranet. Imagine being on the road and remotely monitoring CPU, memory, disks, uptime, load averages and more, using only your iPhone. More Apple talk New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller may have inadvertently disclosed Apple’s long-rumored tablet computer device as he was speaking to his paper’s digital media group last week. Keller was discussing his hopes of delivering the news via an assortment of online media when he said, “I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple Slate…” Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab posted a video and transcript of Keller’s talk. Online pundits and rumormongers pounced on the errant statement as a case of “Nerdian slip” (with apologies to Freud). The Times has allegedly met with Apple executives about the future of digital media and many have guessed that such discussions touched on the possibility of delivering content to an e-reader-like device from Apple. With sales of its desktops and laptops making records every quarter, some still question whether Apple would cannibalize its own business with a netbook or tablet, even one that “thinks different.” Interested in renting a PC or Mac? Request Rental Quote today. Harvesting Entertainment from Render FarmsJune 4th, 2009Before the present Digital Everything Era, film editing was accomplished with the aid of complex, Rube Goldberg-like electromechanical contraptions—plus seasoned professionals wielding sharp razors. Classic animated films owe their existence to small armies of illustrators, colorists and photographers—plus other seasoned professionals wielding sharp eyes. Both kinds of productions were labor-intensive, costly, time-consuming, repetitive and tedious. We are now three decades into the modern computer era, dating from around the time that serious processing power began landing on desktops. The new personal computers (PC’s) eventually evolved to give these animators and filmmakers, as well as the rest of us running businesses or playing games, capable combos of hardware and software onto which we could dump our labor-intensive, costly, time-consuming, repetitive and tedious tasks. Perhaps the most powerful symbol of how far we have come is the “render farm.” Farms in Hollywood?
However, even with the fastest individual PC or 8-core Mac Pro, there can be a lack of computing power when it comes to rendering—performing the final output—from one of these software programs. While an editor or artist will use a single workstation to create and modify their movie or animated film, they can avail themselves of a group of networked computers—the render farm—to output their files into the final product we will see on screen. This means that the creative process can continue on a standalone workstation while the render farm crunches the numbers to produce those final, finished images. No more bottlenecks .. rent a PC or Mac CRE has been configuring render farm rentals from fast PCs and Macs for years, supporting the work of animators, filmmakers, video game artists and post-production professionals. When projects start backing up, clients have a rush job or a system goes on the fritz, entertainment industry veterans know that renting a PC-, Mac Pro- or Xserve-based render farm from CRE can be configured, flight checked and on its way to Ground Zero in no time. Considering the price tag on these potent computers and high-end graphics software, a render farm rental is a cost-effective way to get the work done (fast!) without making a five-figure purchase. We have pre-configured our capable “render farm toolboxes” to handle most anything you throw at them. An extra 16GB of RAM in the 8-core Mac Pro rentals and the crystal clear, accurate color of the 23-inch Apple Cinema Display HD monitors add serious muscle to these state-of-the-art workstations (and we have 30-inch displays, too). When you request a render farm rental quote from CRE you can specify exactly what you need, tell us precisely what you’re doing and be 100% sure that our Account Executives will configure and deliver not just hardware and software, but an efficient, effective solution to your production bottleneck. |
We recently ran a series on Web design tips (
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