New iMac

[Curtis]

I picked up a new iMac for my wife. Her desktop PC was giving her lots of issues and I was never able to find the reason...and her computer was 5 or 6 year old. So I picked up an iMac with a terabyte of memory so she could work with her pictures and videos.

Only one program didn't work on the mac, so we upgraded to Quicken for our bookkeeping software.

I've always liked Apple systems, but never really had one (engineering software is very PC dependent).

I'm open for any suggestions and advice on software or hardware that will make things better.

We also got a free printer/scanner/all-in-one.

[Librarian]

As usual, what exactly do you want to do?

I've got 5 apples on my home network right now, but we're not very demanding.

We've also got 2 of those free printers, on our case HP F4280s. Best I can say for them is they do print.

[sfwdiy]

I picked up a new iMac for my wife. Her desktop PC was giving her lots of issues and I was never able to find the reason...and her computer was 5 or 6 year old. So I picked up an iMac with a terabyte of memory so she could work with her pictures and videos.

Only one program didn't work on the mac, so we upgraded to Quicken for our bookkeeping software.

I've always liked Apple systems, but never really had one (engineering software is very PC dependent).

I'm open for any suggestions and advice on software or hardware that will make things better.

We also got a free printer/scanner/all-in-one.

Get an external USB hard drive to use as a backup. Make sure it's Mac-formatted. Set Time Machine to use it for backup, leave it plugged in and forget it. You WILL need it at some point.

--B

[dandechino]

Congrats on the new iMac! Great little machines. If you ever find a program that must run windows you can just install windows on the iMac as well.

[Rivers]

If you can, upgrade the RAM to at least 4GB. Macsales.com is a reputable online source. If you need to run Win programs, there are two ways to do so: using Apple's Bootcamp to create a suitable partition or, buy and install an OS management app like Parallels. I have a friend who ran SolidWorks on his MacBook a couple years ago. Very reliable and never crashed.

The external USB drive for TimeMachine should be probably 2GB capacity. This included program handles incremental backups seamlessly and will also reinstall all of your contents on a plain install Mac if ever needed. It's pretty impressive as long as you give it the chance to run. TM will configure a regular boxed USB drive to work as a valid backup drive.

[Dutch3]

Get an external USB hard drive to use as a backup. Make sure it's Mac-formatted. Set Time Machine to use it for backup, leave it plugged in and forget it. You WILL need it at some point.

This ^^^^^

Hardware failures have become much more prevalent on Apple machines in recent years. I support about 600 of them at work, and have experienced a much higher percentage of premature HDD and logic board failures than in the past. Add to that keyboards and optical drives, MacBook trackpads, screens and batteries failing at a young age.

Also several that were DOA out of the box or within a few days. Practically unheard of as recently as 5 years ago. I hope you bought the extended AppleCare. I used to consider it a waste of money, as we never used it, but would not be without it these days.

I am a longtime Mac user (I still have functional Mac II's and SE's out in the shed), but have lost a lot of faith in recent years.

-D

[brassburnz]

Costco has Western Digital portable hard drives. I have two 750 gig drives. New drives are 1 TB. About 100 bucks

[Curtis]

Thanks for the advice. We did get the extended care. We also have 4gigs of ram. I do have an external drive I plan to use with time machine. I would prefer a more traditional mouse and keyboard, but my wife likes what came with the program. The only software that we couldn't run on the Mac was MSMoney 2003. So we changed over to Quicken. we didn't bother transferring over the 10+ years of banking records, we just started new on 1/1/11.

We got a free printer. It really only needs to print.

My wife does a lot of craft stuff using Cricket. She also has a lot of pictures and would to use something simple to edit. I'm thinking the basic software will work,but we will see how adventurous she gets.

Thanks again for the input and advice.