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On Feb 14, I took a trip to our local Apple store to purchase a new Intel iMac. Upon arriving I started first by checking out the Dual G5 tower, which was loaded with 2 Gigabytes of RAM. I opened up all the software that I regularly use at home, Photoshop, Soundtrack Pro, iLife 06 Suite, Final Cut, Safari and Dreamweaver on the Mac. I then created new documents in each of the programs to see if I could produce the infamous colored wheel. I found that playing music, creating music, working on graphics and creating web pages at the same time really did nothing short of work. I have been so used to working on my 800 MHz Quicksilver that the colored wheel was just part of the everyday computer experience with me.
Once I finished with the tower I switched to the 2 GHz Intel iMac loaded with 2 Gigabytes of RAM, and started the same process opening the programs and creating documents, with nearly the same results as the G5 tower. It was a little slower with Photoshop and Dreamweaver under Rosetta but as we all know this is a software limitation, as they are not yet dual binary. iLife 06 and Safari where just screamers. And I also wasn't forgetting what I had been using at home, blah… So after all of my sweat and toil in the Apple store J I decided on the shinny new iMac 20 inch with 512 megs of RAM. Now here was where I made my first mistake. Not enough RAM, which I will get into more depth latter on in this article.
After an hour and half on the road travel time, bursting with anticipation, I get my iMac home. Setting up my iMac was pretty straightforward and an easy process. Within about two minutes, literally, my first bongs where coming out of the speakers.
Now having said what an easy process this was, here is where I bump into my first of a couple of hiccups. My plan of attack is to hook a firewire cable from my old Mac to my new one so I could transfer my applications and documents to my new iMac; this is how we get all the important stuff off our old machine onto the new one. Unfortunately it would not read my boot drive. I have 2 drives in my Quicksilver, it read my backup drive fine but could not see my boot drive. I am still not sure why, but after a couple of attempts I abandoned that idea and figured that I would just do it over my network. Enabling me to weed out a lot of the junk files I had collected over time.
My next little hiccup was in regards to my Altec Lansing external speakers that would not work. I plugged them into the only available earphone out hole in the back. To no avail no sound was coming from the speakers. After reading the manual, which is just a small little book, I was still none the wiser. 10 minutes later after going through all the system preferences I could think of. I still had no sound. Then I had a brain wave, why don't I type in the word audio into spotlight. I did and the first thing to pop up was Audio midi set up. On opening Audio midi set up I was able to see that I could set up my audio output. I clicked on few buttons and voila my speakers started pumping out sound.
So now I am of to the races. I start transferring my files from my documents and applications folders onto my new iMac. Which all in all was not that painstaking a task. I eventually finished that project and was ready to start testing this baby.
I fired up Safari, iPhoto, and Mail app. They all seemed to work seamlessly. My iPhoto, Scrolled through over 7,000 photos, just like butterJ. I plugged my iPod and my wife's iPod into the computer and bad a bing! iTunes opened up in a split second, I looked away and by the time I turned to face the computer again my library was starring right at me on the screen and Garageband opened 10 times quicker than it did on my old Mac. At this point I had only been using the Mac Intel native software, which worked fine but as I started to use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, SoundtrackPro and Word, the Rosetta based programs, things started to get a little murky. Only having 512 Megs of RAM on board, Rosetta was not performing optimally. For those of you who don't know what Rosetta is, it's the software that Apple has placed in the new intel based Macs so you can run applications that have not been converted yet. All Mac software has to be converted to dual binary so it can run natively on the new Intel Macs; which as of now is a work in progress for all the third party application developers out there.
Over the next couple of days I slowly added the other applications and files that I needed on my new iMac and throughout this short period of time I was starting to get a little frustrated with the colored wheel. It was showing itself a little too much for my liking. Going back to what I had mentioned earlier, in regards to the mistake I made when buying my iMac, is that Rosetta will not function at a premium with the software that hasn't been switched to the dual binary code. If you don't have enough RAM installed in your computer Rosetta will drag your system down, it becomes a memory hog. My only course of action then, was to buy more RAM So I started to research this and found that a few other fellow Mac users had the same problem with there Macs not having enough RAM. They were also having an added problem of putting in RAM, which turned out to be bad, causing their system to freeze up and the fan to become louder. I apologize but I did not save the web sites I read this on, Google it and you should be able to find these articles. I was not going to let this sway me so of I surfed to Memory to go and bought a 1 Gigabyte stick of RAM for my new iMac.
My RAM arrives by FedEx 2nd day air. By now I had got all my software and files moved to my iMac and was so ready for the added RAM.
I placed a towel on the table unplugged my Mac and lay her face down on top of the towel. I had to un-screw the plate on the bottom of the iMac. My first attempt at seating the RAM into it's slot was unsuccessful, I was being overly cautious, actually I was little scared to push it in to hard for fear of breaking something. I pushed the stick of RAM into the empty slot thinking it was seated properly and screwed the plate back on, plugged my iMac back up and checked, about this Mac in the Apple menu to see if everything had gone well. Unfortunately it still read 512Megs of RAM. The iMac went back on the towel and of came the little panel on the bottom. But this time I put a little elbow grease when pushing the RAM into it's slot. It made a nice snapping sound to let me know it had seated correctly. I wired and fired my iMac back up and there she blew. 1.5GB DDR2 SDRAM Now she was ready to rock and roll.
So I started to test again, opening up all my Rosetta and native applications. But now my iMac was like a totally different machine. It was night and day compared to the previous few days. This girl flew, with Soundtrack pro, Garageband and Dreamweaver open I could do as I pleased and she purred like a kitten. I was in computer (iMac) heaven. My little colored wheel is no more. Well when I get hung up on a server on the web she pokes her beady little colors at me. But that isn't the computers fault.
I have been using this configuration for the last week or so and have had no problems with the computer. She is running like a dream.
Let me know if this article has helped with your decision to purchase a new Intel iMac. You might be switching from PC or just upgrading your older Mac, in any case let me know your stories and experiences.
