I spent the afternoon and evening re-doing and labelling all of the wiring under my desk, installing sound absorbing foam and hooking up the Quad in its permanent home1. I can’t believe I spent ~5 hours doing all this. Unfortunately, I’m going to need to do a little more work to get the PowerMac G4 (my nightly backup machine) under there too… perhaps I should just sell the G4 and get a Mac mini instead2. 🙂
Now that I have the Quad under the desk, I was able to move the old 22″ display to the left of the 30″. I’d always had my PowerBook to the left of the 22″, but when I hooked up the Quad initially I thought it would be interesting to put the secondary monitor on the right instead and see how I liked it.
There are some issues with having the second monitor on the right – mainly, the left side of the main monitor is where windows like to open. That area needs to be fairly central to your keyboard and mouse. Also, I couldn’t put the dock on the right side of the main screen where I was accustomed to having it – it jumped to the second screen.
I’m not sure that the sound absorbing foam is really doing any good or not. I called around for a while before finally finding some at Guitar Center. They carry foam by Aurelex, whom I called and received a recommendation for their 2″ Studiofoam Wedges. The Quad isn’t terribly loud, but it is louder than the PowerBook without the fan on.
I’m having some of the same issues with the Quad and sleep that I was having with the PowerBook – namely, they wake up every 5 minutes or so if I have the USB hub attached. At some point I’ll try to figure out exactly which device is causing this – for now, I’ve hooked the keyboard and mouse up directly.