Previously I posted about my iMac 17″ that I got, that was January 2006 well I have now upgraded to a bigger mac, this time a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo Extreme with 2GB RAM.
I still have the 17″ and will keep it, it’s replacing my really old AMD Linux Desktop on my desk but the 17″ has been getting a bit long in the tooth with Parallels, MS Office, and all sorts of other stuff that I have been doing on it as I am now working full time from home.
Previously I bought at the bottom of the spectrum and the machine lasted well, but I was hoping to keep it as my primary machine for at least 3 years. I guess my needs have increased though so this time I bought at the top end of the range and will upgrade it to 4GB RAM soon, just not from Apple as buying direct from Crucial will save me about 200 pounds.
What immediately annoyed me – to the point of cramps in my hands and general unhappyness – were this amazingly crap thinline keyboard that comes with the machines. I soon started looking at other options and found no 3rd party Mac keyboards but did notice that Microsoft keyboards have a utility to configure the various additional keys etc so I took the plunge and got a MS Natural Ergonomic 400 keyboard to replace my very old MS Office keyboard.
I am extremely pleased with this keyboard, everything works as it should. The configuration utility lets you configure every key on the keyboard and everything is mapped correctly as expected. Even the function keys like ‘new’ works by sending ‘apple key-n’ etc right out of the box, this is the case with all the MS keyboards on the market today so I can happily recommend any MS keyboard to mac users.
The iMac itself is lovely, I am really happy with it. Speed wise the Core 2 Duo Extreme chip has made a huge improvement, with Parallels running Windows the machine idles at about 2% while I have Firefox, Netnewswire, iTerm, several Terminal.app, Adium, Skype and all sorts of background stuff going, really cannot have asked for more from a desktop machine.
