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Well the time came to replace mum’s 14″ CRT monitor. In actual fact she started off with a 15″ monitor though when it died we temporarily hooked up the 14″ monitor, though she had no desire to replace it. Fortunately, for the best part of the last year she was able to use my brother’s 17″ LCD monitor while he was away in Canada but once he got back he was quick to reclaim it. In the end though, it wasn’t just the monitor we replaced, it was the whole computer.

Pictured: The old 14″ monitor, PC, our networked HP Laserjet 4 (with Postscript level 2 support) and yes, you get a glimpse of the replacement system already.

So it was a Mac I decided to get, mainly because I wanted something capable of running OS X. Previously, of all things, she had been running Linux. It was probably the right decision to run Linux at the time, after all we’ve had not a single virus infestation and I was immensely put off running Windows after a spyware toolbar got into Internet Explorer within weeks and just wouldn’t go away no matter what we did. Further more, contrary to what many people believe Linux can be simplified for the end user to quite a degree meaning that no technical knowledge at all is required to run it. However, even still in my opinion KDE still has a rather clumsy GUI and the Debian system resulted in quite a fair bit more work for me. For example, when we wanted to set it up for the digital camera, it involved quite a lot of messing around with file permissions and USB before I could get it working. Compared to the Mac, I just have to plug in the digital camera and iPhoto loads up automatically (not to mention that the program for Linux that I found for organising photos was rather second rate).

For budgetary reasons it was a second hand iMac G3 "Snow" (that being the colour) that we settled for. At 500Mhz it is a fair bit more powerful than the previous 333Mhz Celeron and at 512MB it has twice the RAM. Other features include a CD-RW drive which the previous computer didn’t have, as well as a 40GB hard drive which is the same size as the previous computer.

Pictured: Mum’s new computer; iMac G3 "Snow"

So how about the performance? The G3 is two generations back for the PowerPC platform, yet now three generations for the Mac platform as a whole. Still the first thing I noticed when I turned it on was the incredible boot up time. If you’re used to making a cup of coffee while you wait for your computer to boot up, you’ll probably find that it is booted up and is ready before you even had the chance to turn the kettle on. I know some people achieve the same thing by installing old versions of Windows on their computer, though this is Tiger, the latest version of OS X. Okay though my iBook probably boots in the same time or slightly quicker, while the new Intel Macs are said to boot in 20 seconds. Still, boot up time isn’t all there is to performance.

Overall, performance wise the system is very usable. Instead of running slow, Apple tends to cut back on the eye candy. For example, the famous Exposé feature works though isn’t as smooth as it is on say a G4 mac. At times it may not be as responsive as a new system but it’s not painfully slow either. So overall I’m not disappointed with performance. Even still, the aim was to give mum a taste of the mac and in a few years time when she’s retiring she may well get a new one.

With one feature of Macs that is really nice, I was able to do an install using my OS X Tiger DVD using the DVD-ROM drive on my iBook using FireWire Target Disk Mode. Took my a while to migrate all the data. Can’t wait until next time it’s just another mac we’re upgrading to as I’ll simply be able to use Migration Assistant.

The verdict, well mum is pleased and she’s finding Mac OS X easy to use. The style of macs is also something great and as you can see from the photos, the form factor is much improved.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.