-Setting up a new DuoCore desktop rig this week after succumbing to broadband and admitting the seven year old lime-green iMac would never run OSX/broadband well.
-Its great to have
fast webpages, Hunger Site clickers and Clips & Snips tunes. -Haven’t messed with video chat, but configured an Airport Express wireless router, and, except for having to reconfigure it from default today when the iMac wouldn’t use its signal-am pleased with it.-Whatever it was, resetting the router and rebuilding the network (the work of three minutes) fixed it. I may have toggled a proxy checkbox or similar but couldn’t find the mistake. Sometimes it makes sense to rebuild a tool and delete the old.
-Photos edit swiftly with this, a far cry from my first iMac 266 in 1998 which would crawl through edits and scans and which had barely enough processor power to hang up the modem. This thing screams right along. Given another seven years-it’ll likely seem slow!
In 7 years? Yeah, I think so! 5 years always seems to be the maximum number of years I can eke out of them before the nuisance of obsolete features begins to outweigh frugality. OTOH, I am not clever about tinkering with computers and generally have to accept them as is.
This is my Mac history:
'88 Mac SE
'93 Mac Performa
'98 iMac (hot pink–I didn’t choose)
'00 iBook (orange–I picked. Needed my own no kids, computer.)
'04 my present little white iBook and
an eMachines PC! (kids insisted Macs were for weirdos–they wanted
to do their stuff in the mainstream way.)
'05 White eMac (4 kids doing homework at once, to take some pressure
off the PC–cheapest Mac I could obtain.)
'06 Replaced eMachine with Gateway after it died an untimely death.
And, despite earlier protestations about the weirdness of Macs, daughter #2 has stated that she’d now prefer a Mac as her off-to-college-this-Fall machine.
There have been issues here and there with the Macs, but in the relatively short period of time I’ve had PCs around, they’ve caused me more headaches than all the Macs. It may be just the way I’m oriented, though, so I’m not roundly panning the whole PC enterprise.
BTW, I’m cheap with cars.
-I started down the road to computer perdition when my sweetie took a volunteer posting to northern Queensland in 1998 and couldn’t be reached reliably at her remote research station by phone but could get email periodically. I bought an iMac for email & was hooked on the web by the time she returned. A previous Amiga 500 was fun but not its equal.
-The iMac was the right thing at the right time and pretty simple to set up. This is my third iMac, but it blows the previous two out of the water performance-wise. -Still debating whether PC software makes it worth installing BootCamp & creating a dual-boot Mac/PC for access to the vast universe of PC software. I’ve had a few problems with previous Macs requiring tech support help-but nothing they couldn’t guide me through over the phone.
1988 Mac SE $2800! sold at garage sale for $25 around 1997
1994 Quadra 605 dismantled in about 1999
1997or8 PowerMac 7300 gave it away in about 2003
2000 (I think) iBook G3 now running Ubuntu Linux - but mostly off
2001 G4 still in daily use with OSX
we just bought our 17 year old an Intel dual core mini for his birthday.
I’m running Vine linux and Ubuntu linux (one of each) on “standard” PCs now.
trying to get my parents off windows, but no luck yet.
-My parents are in the Windows comfort zone too and uninterested in switching, but freezeups of their ancient Thinkpad from spyware/virii and no AV have convinced them of the need for better security on its replacement. I wish they’d use a Mac, but a crackerjack geek grandchild nearby is handy tech support.
I am pretty much a PC guy myself. Dual Core Athlon 64s on the desktop regular athlon64 on the latop.
HAve often considered getting a MAc to mess around with Final Cut Pro though 
and the new huge LCD monitors make me drool
I’m glad I’m not the only one who uses the word “virii”
BTW, PowerBook G4 Ti since 2001, and, despite lots of pressure from WinHeaded colleagues, am not going back.
tjh