Shall I...

[Mike_B]

... No, I'm not getting rid of the Lex. Or the R6, for that matter.

But the old Dell in the lounge is getting decidedly tired and slow, and I can't be bothered to upgrade or rebuild it. It's 5 years old... And I've been thinking that since I only really use it for surfing the web and printing, I could replace it with an iMac and therefore get a much better looking machine which is far smaller than the current Dell box and 19" CRT monitor.

I know that Tyger and one or two others here would rather eat their own grandmother than use a Microsoft machine, but the simple fact is that my Vista laptop 'just works' and with a little forethought and common sense, viruses can be avoided perfectly easily as well. So I don't buy into the 'Macs just work and PCs don't' argument too well.

So the question is, am I gonna lose anything by moving to apple? Only other thing I use the Dell for is as a print server, I assume i can use the iMac to do this as well? There are drivers for the printer on HPs site, so that shouldn't be a problem. And I can always use a virtualisation solution to run Windows if I need to (and I might well do, for work purposes, customer-provided VPN software etc).

I'm looking at a 24"model (the screens are allegedly much superior to the 20" ones?), 2.8GHz chip, probably with a 500GB disk and 4GB RAM.

Thoughts, anyone? Preferably not too rabid... :winky:

[Parthiban]

If you don't actually want an apple, and more just the design, have you looked at the other one box PCs out there now? There are so many, the Sony ones are nice, and I quite like the HP one with the touch screen.........

[WylieCoyote]

The macs are fabulous machines. However, if you have software, a change is likely to be very expensive. Macs are expensive to buy, software is expensive and so on.

These days, there's little to choose between the two systems - you buy a mac because you want one because, let's face it, they just look nicer. The mac OS is said to be more stable, maybe so but Windows is pretty good these days.

You are correct, the 24" screen has a better spec than the 20" and has a decent spec machine with it. However, you'll pay £1300 odd for the privilege. For that kind of money, in my opinion you'd get a Windows machine that graphically and performance wise totally wipes the floor with the Mac.

Alternatively as Parthiban says, if you want one for style, look at Sony Multimedia PC's - they're pretty stylish (as stylish as a box with a screen can be anyway).

If you want to spend £12-1300 on a mac, that's cool but also consider the expense of changing software and look at your printer/scanner and so on as some of them are not mac compatible.

Good luck with the purchase!

[84Stoney]

Yes the HP Pavilion is a nice machine. Some "livingroom PCs" are very stylish, Sony's VGX-XL301 type thing (sorry if that code is jibberish, from memory!) is the size of separates hi-fi component (43cm/17") and can be placed in a hi-fi rack and run throu HDMI to a HDTV if you mainly use it for media and surfing. I want one but way skint!

Macs have their advantages, but spec for the money, i'm with Mr. Gates.

(Oh, and R6 - Nice! Don't spose ya know anyone wants to buy a cheap one? Mine need turning to cash!)

[Vyker]

Working for HP, I can probably get you onto the "Friends and Family" store for added discounts, if it helps.

[aido]

I'd certainly give it a go Mike :)

To be honest the reason I switched about 6 years ago at home was that I'd gotten fed up of using Windows at work all day and then having the same sorts of issues at home!

I like the apple experience to be honest, everything just tends to work most of the time, don't get me wrong you'll still hit issues every now and then but I just saw it as a new learning curve and to be honest that's probably why I like it!

As for print server you could probably just use the inbuilt lpd server or possibly just share via samba- I'm not talking from experience though as I've never used a printer on the Mac and my lpd experience was all on HPUX or Solaris.

Like you say you can use VMWare or Parallel on Osx for virtualization when you need it, I stood up a working public facing LCS infrastructure in vms on osx and it was fine.

To be honest most of my usage is browsing and handling media - no worries there. The only thing I could never do natively was burn cue / mp3 files, never did find a copy of cdrdao with lame linked in.

The Office suite exists natively on OSS but you'll struggle with Project and Visio files just as you would on Linux, but for a home machine I don't consider it a problem

I'd definitely say give it a go, then again I'm one of these that tries every Os but I think you'd probably like it!

[swfcdan]

i bought a an imac in February after never using one before other than messing around in my local apple store. for what i need and what have you, i cannot see myself ever going back to a PC again. Im not even that fussed about computers, but i absolutely love it. I would recommend a mac to anybody over a PC based just on my personal experience.

plus the added benefit (at a cost) is that if you MUST use windows, then you can run both widows and OSX on a mac.

in term of spec, it depends what you are wanting to do, if you have a local apple store i would recommend going in and actually talking to the guys who work there (top notch customer service).

I went to my local apple store with the cash to buy the top spec 24" mac, had a play around and what have you and loved them. Spent a good half an hour with one of the staff there and after talking to them, he recommended that i just buy the cheaper model as this would suffice for my needs, these being the basics ie music, photos, word processing and a bit of video editing etc.

in the end i ended up just buying the entry level 20" mac and to date it has been fantastic. We have since bought a macbook and a 24" mac for the family computer. In terms of screen quality, there isn't any difference between the 20" and 24" IMO (other than the size of course).

in terms of the spec ( and im not technically minded at all) it seems that macs dont need the extra power of PC's. so the lesser spec for the same price PC isnt a fair comparison. I use a Dell machine running vista at work with 2GB RAM and again only use the basic office functions. It was brand new and installed over xmas ready for when we went back to work in the new year, 6 months on and it runs significantly slower than my 1GB RAM mac, and has crashed on more than several occasions.

As i said i'd never used a mac until February and after just a few months use i am completely won over.

[Mike_B]

Well thanks for all the replies guys, it seems like the Mac will definitely do what I want it to do (though will have to buy a new scanner, since the old one is 10 years old and requires an archaic SCSI card).

I live near Kingston and there is a Mac store there, I know the staff are meant to be really helpful so I will go in and speak to them.

I tend to keep stuff quite a long time (the Dell is a PIII 1GHz, and I threw out my previous PC only this weekend which was a 433MHz Celeron, so that should give you a clue as to how long I keep stuff running for!!) so I may as well spend a few pennies more upfront and get something really nice, hence the high spec I was looking at.

[WylieCoyote]

I'll echo what swfcdan says - I have a few photographer friends that use Macs and they all say how good the customer service is. That makes a huge difference to a product.

[aido]

They're not always that good - they wanted to charge me £79 to fix a dead iPod Shuffle I had - as it only cost me £99 I told them to stick it and threw it in a drawer - 6 months later I noticed they'd released a software fix for the exact problem and it fixed it! Cheeky buggers!

[Mike_B]

Well I did it... Got a shiny new 24" iMac with the 2.8GHz chip and a 500GB hard drive. And very nice it is too... I've sullied it with a copy of VMware Fusion as I'm doing some courses on Windows Server 2008 at the moment and the final chapter of the current book requires the concurrent use of 7 machines - so I've splashed out and bought 4GB of RAM for it too!

I actually got it about 6 weeks ago, and not missing anything much yet. MSN Messenger for Mac is pretty rubbishy but aMSN seems OK if a touch buggy.

[WylieCoyote]

I'm jealous now. I want one! Glad you're pleased with it.