Here is my ridiculous story.
I have a 20" G5 iMac. It's an awesome computer and does almost everything I need. I upgraded it to Leopard, put in the most RAM it can have (2.5gb) and bought a 320gb Lacie external hard disk for a Time Machine.
However, one thing has always niggled me - I was one of those unlucky people who bought the computer a month before Apple switched to Intel. Since then, I've missed out on some quality PC games like Medieval 2 which I've been aching to play. Furthermore, I had become concerned that the PowerPC chips are likely to be unsupported in the future and my sound card (or drivers) keeps intermittently failing to work after booting the computer (Onyx fixes this) and it goes through spells of forgetting my preferred wireless network. I think this may be down to the Leopard upgrade, as it never used to do this on Tiger. A fresh install might cure the problem, but it's rather minor.
Fast forward three years and I've just finished four years at University (during which my Mac never missed a beat). Thinking that I could sell this Mac for around £450-500 (seriously, they sell for this price on eBay), I would save money by building a PC and putting on Vista. I could expand it in the future, and wouldn't have to rebuy things like the monitor, mouse & keyboard, case and PSU. It can't be that bad, right?
Right. Vista wasn't too bad at all. What was, however, was the incredible amount of noise generated by the thing. Incredibly, every component I bought was 'silent' so I shouldn't have had this problem. Luckily, I bought from eBuyer and they were brilliant. Fearing having to eBay the thing, they accepted it as a return.
Rewind to last Wednesday. My brother, the avid Mac hater and computer programmer, finally got fed up of bashing his (incredibly expensive) PC around with a wrench after a nightmare of Vista 64 driver issues, leaking water cooling solutions, fried RAM... the list goes on. After hearing wonderful stories about my Mac, he decided to take the plunge. Eager to use my student discount for the final time, I decided to buy one too to replace my ageing machine.
When there, we bought two top of the range iMacs. Originally, I was going to wait until January to see if the lower end models saw a GPU increase, but decided that the 24" behemoth had plenty of poke with a 8800 stuck in it.
However, when I got home I was a bit confuddled.
I'd just spent £1300 on a new iMac... and I'm starting to wonder if I need such an expensive computer. I don't really need the 24" screen, as 20" is fine, but the GPU on the smaller model is an absolute disaster taking into account the overall price of the machine, thus making me opt for the bigger computer. Furthermore, my Time Machine is now too small for the 500gb hard disk the new iMac comes with.
Should I return it? Should I bite the bullet and start transferring all my stuff over using the £15 Firewire cable? Should I sell all my worldly possessions as penance for making such poor and hasty buying decisions?
I have a 20" G5 iMac. It's an awesome computer and does almost everything I need. I upgraded it to Leopard, put in the most RAM it can have (2.5gb) and bought a 320gb Lacie external hard disk for a Time Machine.
However, one thing has always niggled me - I was one of those unlucky people who bought the computer a month before Apple switched to Intel. Since then, I've missed out on some quality PC games like Medieval 2 which I've been aching to play. Furthermore, I had become concerned that the PowerPC chips are likely to be unsupported in the future and my sound card (or drivers) keeps intermittently failing to work after booting the computer (Onyx fixes this) and it goes through spells of forgetting my preferred wireless network. I think this may be down to the Leopard upgrade, as it never used to do this on Tiger. A fresh install might cure the problem, but it's rather minor.
Fast forward three years and I've just finished four years at University (during which my Mac never missed a beat). Thinking that I could sell this Mac for around £450-500 (seriously, they sell for this price on eBay), I would save money by building a PC and putting on Vista. I could expand it in the future, and wouldn't have to rebuy things like the monitor, mouse & keyboard, case and PSU. It can't be that bad, right?
Right. Vista wasn't too bad at all. What was, however, was the incredible amount of noise generated by the thing. Incredibly, every component I bought was 'silent' so I shouldn't have had this problem. Luckily, I bought from eBuyer and they were brilliant. Fearing having to eBay the thing, they accepted it as a return.
Rewind to last Wednesday. My brother, the avid Mac hater and computer programmer, finally got fed up of bashing his (incredibly expensive) PC around with a wrench after a nightmare of Vista 64 driver issues, leaking water cooling solutions, fried RAM... the list goes on. After hearing wonderful stories about my Mac, he decided to take the plunge. Eager to use my student discount for the final time, I decided to buy one too to replace my ageing machine.
When there, we bought two top of the range iMacs. Originally, I was going to wait until January to see if the lower end models saw a GPU increase, but decided that the 24" behemoth had plenty of poke with a 8800 stuck in it.
However, when I got home I was a bit confuddled.
I'd just spent £1300 on a new iMac... and I'm starting to wonder if I need such an expensive computer. I don't really need the 24" screen, as 20" is fine, but the GPU on the smaller model is an absolute disaster taking into account the overall price of the machine, thus making me opt for the bigger computer. Furthermore, my Time Machine is now too small for the 500gb hard disk the new iMac comes with.
Should I return it? Should I bite the bullet and start transferring all my stuff over using the £15 Firewire cable? Should I sell all my worldly possessions as penance for making such poor and hasty buying decisions?
