It's day 4 using the new iMac and I'm head over heals. I can see my old PC out the corner of my eye over there and instead of feeling sorry for it, I feel like kicking it and then tossing it out the window. I feel like I've been driving a Yugo for the past 12 years and then winning a Ferrari in a contest.
I was away on business when the iMac arrived so I was getting pretty antsy to get home. Finally, after escaping northern California and her unforgiving traffic quagmire, I was back in Nevada and eying that huge box the 24" is housed in. 41 minutes later I had the 4gigs of RAM that I had bought separately installed and the Leopard disc was in place putting the new OS on board the 500gig HDD. There was nothing to it!
"Hell, the thing must be getting ready to overheat and explode", I thought as I wasn't able to hear the usual 747 taxiing on the runway fan sounds the PC use to churn out for me. Nothing but near silence.
I looked with my untrained eye for gradient defects and dead pixels but saw nothing as Leopard sprang to life for the first time. After waxing nostalgically about the days of hunting down driver disks and getting installation sequences correct after a new OS install (not!), I quickly installed iWork without problem and moved on to exploring the new sinewy,sleek cat. Amazingly quick and intuitive I found it to be with only the minor inconvenience of the close, shrink and expand buttons being over on the left and the menu bar not following the window around. Even my coffee starved, feeble brain was able to overcome these trivial differences and move on. I love the feel and look of the Dock down there at the bottom. It beats the hell out of my old START button and fuzzy,small icons I used to drag to the task bar in Windows. ichat looks like a feature rather than a potential security threat and something that needs disabling immediately like Messenger does in Windows. "Hey! where the hell is my antivirus software? Am I exposing myself to instant viral death right now?" "Oh yeah, no need to worry you're in a safer place now,keep moving." All the apps I opened and explored seemed refined and extremely intuitive.....I was wondering why there weren't reams of manuals in the box.
And the speed, oh the speed. 2.4GHZ of howling cat. I've yet to wait around while watching that sand-timer thingie churn and churn while waiting for something to load like I used to. The old 1.6GHZ AMD Yugo chip just didn't have it anymore. I took on the task of moving my iTunes library over to the iMac and it went fast and flawless. 17k plus of music swung over whilst I took a shower and read some mail. A task that took a day or two on the PC due to lack of speed and crashes etc. What a difference! I then fired up Front Row with the very cool and inspired remote and enjoyed some tunes while I did laundry and put away my traveling gear.
Again, I love this rig. I was wary of moving over-especially after reading about the freezes, gradient problems etc. gone over in great lengths on these forums. But I realized that mostly folks with problems are going to to look for a spot to air them and this is the place to do it. I want to be one of those with a some good things to say....although I'd come here to get problems solved too. There's nothing wrong with that-you just have to understand the the ratio between problems and good results and par them accordingly.
Unfortunately, I'm off to buy a Vista version so I can take advantage of an incredible feature the Mac allows and install Vista. I need it to feed my Orange Box addiction. Not to worry though, I'll give it minimal partition space and treat it accordingly.
Thanks for all the insights and gleaned knowledge posted on these boards, I'll be back for more. Heck, I even subscribed to the RSS feed.
Jeff Jackson
Mac User
I was away on business when the iMac arrived so I was getting pretty antsy to get home. Finally, after escaping northern California and her unforgiving traffic quagmire, I was back in Nevada and eying that huge box the 24" is housed in. 41 minutes later I had the 4gigs of RAM that I had bought separately installed and the Leopard disc was in place putting the new OS on board the 500gig HDD. There was nothing to it!
"Hell, the thing must be getting ready to overheat and explode", I thought as I wasn't able to hear the usual 747 taxiing on the runway fan sounds the PC use to churn out for me. Nothing but near silence.
I looked with my untrained eye for gradient defects and dead pixels but saw nothing as Leopard sprang to life for the first time. After waxing nostalgically about the days of hunting down driver disks and getting installation sequences correct after a new OS install (not!), I quickly installed iWork without problem and moved on to exploring the new sinewy,sleek cat. Amazingly quick and intuitive I found it to be with only the minor inconvenience of the close, shrink and expand buttons being over on the left and the menu bar not following the window around. Even my coffee starved, feeble brain was able to overcome these trivial differences and move on. I love the feel and look of the Dock down there at the bottom. It beats the hell out of my old START button and fuzzy,small icons I used to drag to the task bar in Windows. ichat looks like a feature rather than a potential security threat and something that needs disabling immediately like Messenger does in Windows. "Hey! where the hell is my antivirus software? Am I exposing myself to instant viral death right now?" "Oh yeah, no need to worry you're in a safer place now,keep moving." All the apps I opened and explored seemed refined and extremely intuitive.....I was wondering why there weren't reams of manuals in the box.
And the speed, oh the speed. 2.4GHZ of howling cat. I've yet to wait around while watching that sand-timer thingie churn and churn while waiting for something to load like I used to. The old 1.6GHZ AMD Yugo chip just didn't have it anymore. I took on the task of moving my iTunes library over to the iMac and it went fast and flawless. 17k plus of music swung over whilst I took a shower and read some mail. A task that took a day or two on the PC due to lack of speed and crashes etc. What a difference! I then fired up Front Row with the very cool and inspired remote and enjoyed some tunes while I did laundry and put away my traveling gear.
Again, I love this rig. I was wary of moving over-especially after reading about the freezes, gradient problems etc. gone over in great lengths on these forums. But I realized that mostly folks with problems are going to to look for a spot to air them and this is the place to do it. I want to be one of those with a some good things to say....although I'd come here to get problems solved too. There's nothing wrong with that-you just have to understand the the ratio between problems and good results and par them accordingly.
Unfortunately, I'm off to buy a Vista version so I can take advantage of an incredible feature the Mac allows and install Vista. I need it to feed my Orange Box addiction. Not to worry though, I'll give it minimal partition space and treat it accordingly.
Thanks for all the insights and gleaned knowledge posted on these boards, I'll be back for more. Heck, I even subscribed to the RSS feed.
Jeff Jackson
Mac User
