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(More customer reviews)First, let me provide a bit of background. I have been a computer nut for about 25 years. I started banging out Basic programs on the original Commodor PET in elementary school. Since then, I have suffered the irresitable compulsion to purchase every "next great computer" offered. I have been through TRS-80s, Ataris, Amigas, Apples, and of course, many ubiquitous "PCs."
I had strayed from Apple since owning a Color Classic in 1993 until 2001. At that time, the new Apple Cube caught my eye, as well as the beta version of OS X. I love the FreeBSD operating system, and was very excited about running a Unix distribution on a well-integrated consumer desktop. Alas, I must admit I was disappointed. The original OSX was far to slow for any reasonable work. Worse yet, it lacked the support to allow me to do simple tasks "what do you mean I can't play DVDs and my printer isn't supported?!?!" Nevertheless, I decided to try to stick with it. I sold the Cube and bought a DP 533 and 17 Studio display. Better performance, but still many nagging problems doing things that were a snap on a garden variety PC. I sold the DP 533, and bought two more PCs in the following two years.
My last system was a AMD XP 2800+, DVD-R, 1 GB of ram and a 19" LCD. Performance was satisfactory expect for three things (1) the system was unacceptably loud for my home office, (2) it was nearly impossible to create a decent DVD despite trying a number of software packages (I have a two year-old daughter and new son on the way--lots of video), and (3) I HATE WINDOWS. The system required constant tweaking and chasing down glitches.
Finally, I broke down, sold the PC and bought a 20" iMac. Unlike my experience two years ago, I am happy to report that Apple has got it right. The system works as advertised. The machine is quiet, well designed, and beautiful (had to mention that in any discussion of a mac). As a bonus, the system came with a suite of applications that cover almost every common task, often much more smoothly then their Windows counterparts. (Quicken, AppleWorks,iTunes, iPhoto, iEtc...) Add to that the huge collection of open source unix-based software available for free and you will find you need to buy very little additional software.
While I was concerned about the speed of a 1.25GHZ G4 vs. my PC juggernaut, this was unwarranted. I am sure in pure processing speed, my new mac is not as fast. However, I have no complaints about speed and responsiveness when editing video, developing java applications on Netbeans, or playing the occasional game. The large screen makes it easy to juggle many windows, and Safari offers the best web browsing experience I have seen to date. I would recommend that you order your iMac with the 160GB drive and at least 512MB of memory for best performance.
I find the 20" iMac to provide a very enjoyable overall computing experience. One caveat -- I would make sure your essential applications and peripherals will work with the machine. There are still some voids in hardware support, but not nearly what it was two years ago. Check out Apple's excellent web site for more information. If the 20" iMac fits the bill in that regard, go for it, it is an excellent machine.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Apple iMac Desktop with 20" Display M9290LL/A (1.25-GHz PowerPC G4, 256 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD-RW/CD-RW Drive)
PC Silver carbonite 1920 x 1200 / 60 Hz 0.27 mm 500 cd/m2 1000:1 24-bit (16.7 million colors) 3 years warrantyDesigned for workstation and high-end business users the HP
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