I’ve been running my G4 Powerbook laptop for roughly 2 1/2 years. The ram is maxed out at 1.25 gigs. While the computer is working well, I am tempted by the new Imacs. Since Leopard has just been released the time seems ripe for a new computer. I don’t do any video editing yet, but I may eventually want to dabble with recording audio. The biggest resource hogging program I use is Finale for music compositions. Right now Finale 2007 is chugging on my powerbook. I also have a 17inch monitor and the possibility of having two monitors is exciting. How are these new Imacs? The only other complaint I have regarding my Powerbook is that videos on the internet tend to run slow. Would this be solved on an Imac?
If you can afford it, you won’t regret it. The new machines are fast. The videos streaming from the internet may be a slow connection, though, which would not improve. Do they play better the second time on your existing machine?
Some websites are just slow for video. I get good download speeds. For example the daily show website videos just DRAG all the way through.
Exact same situation. Last model of the powerbook G4 release before the switch to Intel. I formatted the drive and did a clean installation–this time without all the extra crap Apple crams into their default installs-- and saved 10GB of HD space plus the computer runs a lot faster.
I only have 768MB of ram, but it’s not too hard to run out with iTunes, FireFox (damn you memory leaks) and Azureus all running at once. Each one can easily take up 120MB or more on its own if left to their own devices.
If you haven’t done it before, I recommend just doing a fresh install of the OS, and seeing what that doess. I know, I know, “you don’t have to do that on a mac! It just works!”, but I did it and it helped a lot.