Buying advice please....

[teerexx52]

I currently have an ibook 12" and a Mac Mini 1.42 hooked to a 20" Cinema display. My problem is that thed Mac Mini seems just too slow for me doing every day things like burning cds, doing idvd and such. I have 512mb of ram in it but to increase it seems to cost too much unless i do it myself. I am kind of leary of opening up the case. I don't want a Powerbook as I love the the portability of my ibook. I was thinking of selling the mini and the 20" display for an imac 17" or 20" I am wondering if the imac would be significantly faster than the mini and ibook. Not sure what to do about this or just sit tight until next year. Thanks for any advice.

 

[md11]

I don't want a Powerbook as I love the the portability of my ibook.

AFAIK the PB is portable as well - and would fit all your needs?

 

[gekko513]

The iMac would be approx. 30-50% faster than your Mac mini and iBook on processor intensive tasks. The G4 and the G5 is comparable when it comes to performance per GHz.

In addition the 3.5" drive in the iMac will be 60-100% faster than the notebook drives in the Mac mini and the iBook and that will be beneficial for tasks that require a lot of disk access.

An iMac with 1GB RAM will be like night and day compared to a Mac mini with 512MB RAM.

 

[teerexx52]

Thanks for the help. I was pretty sure that the slow HD on the Mini was slowing things down considerably. I have to decide what to do on this. Seems the imac may be a good choice. 17" or 20"?

 

[gekko513]

You could also consider getting an external 3.5" 7200RPM Firewire drive for the Mac mini and use that as the boot drive. I saw someone posting about that recently and said it definitely made a difference.

 

[gekko513]

A warning about the iMac, though. Some people have experienced that the vertically mounted optical drive on the iMac wasn't able to burn DVDs as fast as it should no matter what medium they tried.

 

[eXan]

Thanks for the help. I was pretty sure that the slow HD on the Mini was slowing things down considerably. I have to decide what to do on this. Seems the imac may be a good choice. 17" or 20"?

Don't forget that iMac has Serial ATA harddrive, which is faster than non-G5 Macs' HDs (Also 7200 rmp vs 4200 or 5400 in Mini)

As for 17 vs 20 inch, It really depends on what are u doing with your computer. We've bought 17 inch not only because the price was lower, but also because 1440x900 is enough for me. I think that 1650x1080 in 20-incher is 2 much, for me at least.

 

[teerexx52]

Is the 17" screen as nice as the 20" in terms of brightness and text clarity?

 

[ipacmm]

Is the 17" screen as nice as the 20" in terms of brightness and text clarity?

I would get the 20" because when you see them next to each other, the 20" looks much better and has a bigger screen and is also faster.