Great addition to our family
Written: Jul 06 '02 (Updated Jul 06 '02)
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Pros: Small footprint. Bright, easy to read LCD, snappy
Cons: Limited expandability
The Bottom Line: Awesome machine and great looking! Price is pretty good for all the features that you get. Best thing to do is buy additional RAM.
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| kendals's Full Review: Apple Flat Panel iMac 700MHz G4 / 15-in. TFT / 40G... |
I purchased my brand new system online, and when it came even my wife was excited to see me unpack it. Apple even went to great details on packaging the new iMac. Everything arrived in perfect shape and it literally took just 8 minutes to get it set on my desk, all cables attached and registered via the Internet! My previous machine was a Desktop G3 Beige system with a 17" CRT monitor. When I put my new iMac in its place...WOW! What a difference! My old system was SO bulky compared to the new iMac, I have so much more room now! The CD-RW/DVD unit is the "middle of the road" for features. I went round and round on trying to decide if I wanted a DVD burner or not on my new system. After much research into the various models, I decided to go for the CD-RW/DVD model. True, the "top of the line" system has an additional 100Mhz, a DVD-R and bigger HD, but I couldn't justify spending the extra $$ for high-end model. Most research shows that the additional 100Mhz in speed only results in about a 10% speed increase.
The biggest thing that you can do to speed it up is to buy more RAM...alot more! The stock system comes with 256Mb of RAM which is double the requirements for MacOS X, but if you are going to run alot of apps simultaneously then you will need alot more memory. I launched iPhoto on the "stock" system (256Mb RAM) and it was very slow, (although *much* faster than my old G3/300 system!) I could hear the HD constantly writing to the swap file which really slows down MacOS X. I also had the CPU monitor utility running during that test, and it stayed pretty much in the 90% plus range the entire time iPhoto was running. Next, I shutdown the system and installed 512Mb of RAM (768Mb total), restarted, and ran the same tests. iPhoto was remarkably faster and the CPU gauge stayed in the 50-60% range. I use a utility called MemoryStick (very handy), the gives you an audible warning everytime the Swap file is being accessed. Before I installed the 512Mb of RAM, Memory stick was beeping every 2 seconds letting me know that it was swapping out. After I installed the additional 512Mb of RAM and restarted, MemoryStick never beeped once!
I also use iMovie and VirtualPC alot and you need alot of memory for these applications as well. So, buy more RAM when you buy your iMac. Memory prices are pretty cheap right so, so buy alot if you can.
My wife and kids love the machine and its design. My 5 year-old son came into my office and wanted to know if he could have a computer like mine! It really is a work of art that you could put anywhere in your house.
Something else that is really, REALLY nice is that it is very quiet. My old G3/300 desktop system was very noisy and when I hooked up my new iMac, my ceiling fan was more noisy than the iMac!
Apple has really made an aweseome system with this iMac and it is WELL worth your purchase.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1400
Operating System: Macintosh
Processor: PowerPC G4
Processor speed: 601-700
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
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Epinions.com ID:
kendals
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Reviews written: 1
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