after many months without a desktop pc (limited exclusively to my marvellous, but just too small for development, Tz laptop), i finally got round to purchasing this new toy. Having had a sony all-in-one previously, I knew this was just the sort of thing i was after – large screen, multi-media device that i can also use as a tv. And there simply isn’t anything nicer looking than the lovely, lovely new 24″ iMacs…
A 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD although slightly more expensive than the equivalent competition from Dell and Sony is better specified. Whilst the Sony comes ready equipped with twin tv tuners and acts as a PVR, this has its own annoyances as it means a) getting an ariel from tv/digibox to the pc (which isn’t in the same room) b) having recordings in multiple places. not major problems i admit. A reasonable alternative, it seems to me, is to use a slingbox from digibox/PVR, which negates the need for on-board tuners. Still, why the iMac doesn’t come with such is clearly remiss of apple given the excellent screen and graphics. in fact that, flash storage input and limited integrated connectivity (usb, firewire & mini-dvi out are essentially it) seem to be the only downsides so far. but then lack of basic connectivity is why i chose sony over the macbook air. time will tell.
now I exclusively run Vista on this, and it was truly easy to set such up, boot camp is brilliant - with all the vista drivers included on the leopard disks. And it’s not slow…
the only problems I’ve had to date is getting used to the iMac keyboard layout, some shortcut keys dont seem to work within Office, but if i just cant get used to it, I can always replace it. For the hardcore mac user, i may have said several blasphemies in this post; but the iMac really is an excellent Vista PC…
ah, have figured out the keyboard layout and how to get those shortcut keys to work – pressing the mac keyboard fn button along with the function key in question does the trick: keyboard mapping. even so i still can’t get used to the placement of the @ and ” keys! however, my daughter loves the keyboard and mouse so much, i don’t think i can ever get rid of it now…
Yip, windaes keyboards do indeed have the ” and @ placement the wrong way around, or should I say the @ and ” placement, as I am currently typing this on a rattly Dell keyboard. You should explore OSX too you know, it’s still not too late…