Are iMacs any good?

tomstickland

I went round to help a family friend sort some Ebay auctions out the other night. She was running a hand-me-down iMac of some sort. I've never used one of these before, so it took me a while to suss out how to work it. I got there in the end and found the interface quite logical.

However, the thing ran very very slowly. It was taking 2-5seconds to respond to most requests. It was pretty much unworkable.

Are they slow? Or was there some problem, like a heavily fragmented disc? I looked on the help but there was no mention of defragmenting.

muddyfox470

It depends on what you want them for.

If you have a relatively recent mac they will pretty much run anything, the mini macs are pretty good value for money.

Great movie, office and internet work horses, but dont get a mac if you want to play games, you will find it hard to play games, and you could be stuck in finding hardware to play the games on the mac.

Everything slows down with age, and it is likely that it could be a fragmented disk, or similar. But from what i have seen the new macs are very quick, good looking/sleek machines.

Macs are good, just depends on what you expect out of them.

Ian

tomstickland

I don't want one for anything personally. I've got a hand-me-down PC.

W1zz

If it was one of the older iMacs (tear drop shapped all in one coloured) then these are Apple Macintosh G3's with at best a 450mhz (snow white) PowerPC processor.
The coloured flavours ranged from 233mhz to 350mhz processors.

Main reason why these run slow is Memory - As standard they came with 64mb or 128mb of memory (Standard PC100) - The HD's were also only 8gig as standard.

What OS was it running - OSX will sturggle to run and needs at least 256mb of memory.

The Mini-Mac is based around a PowerPC G4 processor a much faster chip than the G3.

The new G5 iMac, with the flat screens are whoooosh!!!.

W1zz

tomstickland

This was a single squashed bubble shaped unit in a sort of clear colour, CD player on the front, USB ports on the side. Too slow to be considered usable.

oh_no_5

Hey I just bought one of those on EvilBay for £50.It's an Imac G3 233mhz with a 4GB hard drive and 192mb RAM running OS9.2.

I bought it cos I was curious about Macs in general and was thinking about buying a new one.

OK it's a little bit pedestrian in the speed stakes but for what I use it for (surfing,downlaoding/organising photos and the odd letter)it is perfectly capable.

What I like about it is its all-in-one design,all the gubbins are behind the screen so you haven't got two plates of spaghetti at the back,just one power lead.

I needed my own PC cos I couldn't get my two daughters off MSN even with a crow bar !! and this is a damn sight cheaper than the £400+ I would have needed to shell out for lap-top or PC.

Although I've only dipped my toe into the Apple experience,so far I have been pleasantly surprised.

rich_jtg

After 12 years of owning a PC, I've just bought one of the upgraded mac minis.

They take a bit of getting used to if you've been using a PC, but the interface is very nice and computer is very capable. I'm presently going through a book to learn more advanced parts of the operating system.

I still use a PC for 'donkey work' like processing camcorder footage, but for general use macs are like a breath of fresh air.

There is alot of useful free software provided - iLife which has applications for creating home movies, working with photos, and creating music (and more!) and there's an equivalent of Works for doing spreadsheets, databases and word processing.

Why did I change originally? Because I was fed up of spending hours scanning my PC with anti-virus/spyware software.

Apparently, at present, there isn't any viruses or spyware that affects OS X so it's another thing not to worry about.

If you have a display, keyboard and mouse already, mac minis are quite good. If not look at the iMacs.

tomstickland

Or run Win 98, since most viruses can't be bothered with that anymore.

superscotsman

It sounds as though there is something wrong with the iMac. When compared with PCs - machine for machine - the Macs win hands down. But there are downsides with Macs and one of them is that they are difficult to work on. I am not sure, but i think someone told me that you need a special tool to open an iMac, which means you need to take it to a Mac repairer, and that means an invoice for at least £75. It could be a fragmented disk, although it is difficult to damage mac disks, might also be a problem with the chipset - could be any number of things.
It is possible to soup up macs. I have an early Performa which is souped up, but I had to get an expert to do it for me, whereas I can do most jobs on my PC myself.

tomstickland

OK, I will asssume that there's something wrong with this iMac. It's very slow.

firedog_2

rich_jtg wrote:

After 12 years of owning a PC, I've just bought one of the upgraded mac minis.

They take a bit of getting used to if you've been using a PC, but the interface is very nice and computer is very capable. I'm presently going through a book to learn more advanced parts of the operating system.

I'd also recommend getting hold of Mac Creative* magazine, which is an inspiring read if you want to get into the creative stuff - certainly enough to tempt you to drop the PC for the moviemaking MacUser is very good too, albeit more serious.

It's certainly true that there are no Mac viruses or spyware.


* I should admit gross bias here as I write for it.