Greetings Mac people. Just got an Imac today after years of frustration with PC repairs and viruses. It was an impulse buy because I'm just fed up with endless PC breakdowns and the thought of buying a new PC with Vista is chilling given how many problems people are having with it. So instead of trying to get a machine with XP and having a potentially limited time before they stop supporting that, I turned to Mac.
I've been working on getting up and running all evening and I've got some concerns that I'm hoping you all can help me with.
The pain of transitioning from 2 decades of PC to this Mac interface is one thing. It's hard and I have no idea why this mouse behaves the way it does and why windows keep jumping around and going gray or in and out of focus, etc... But I'm sure I will eventually tame the interface and probably come to prefer it. But that's not why I'm coming to you.
My issue is simple: performance speed. I got the imac with the 20 in screen and it seemed like a really decent machine. But so far, everything it's done has been incredibly slow. As soon as I logged and got set up for the first time I went to the apple site and tried to watch a video about Leopard. I have DSL but was unable to view either the small, medium or large version of the video without experiencing incredible choppiness. The large version was totally impossible, and I eventually had to give up on even the small version. I clicked the download link for the 379mb file, but it said it would take several hours to load. I can't remember anything taking several hours to download other than a full-length feature film. I'm used to fast and seamless video on my crappy toshiba laptop with this exact same internet connection. So that was a frustrating and confusing first experience with the imac.
Next, an update window poppped up telling me that there was a big list of updates available for various programs etc. I started the downloads and was amazed at the slow download speeds. Small updates of 15 meg or so were taking MINUTES and MINUTES to download. About 20 minutes into the updates I finally had to quit because I started the process of upgrading to Leopard and had to restart.
So, I insert the Leopard disc and the first thing that happens is that a message appears saying the Imac needed to check the leopard DVD for consistency. The little progress bar appeared and I waited... and waited. It took more than 30 minutes for the machine to "check the consistency" of the Leopard DVD, whatever that means. Finally, the disc started loading. The progress bar appeared and said it was "calculating" the remaining load time. It took about 10 full minutes to calculate the loading time and then I was appalled to see that the load time was nearly TWO HOURS!! So I left and came back an hour later... sure enough, still loading. I left again and by the time I came back another hour later, it was finally done.
So now I've got my leopard going and I figured I'd try the internet and see if I can manage the browser interface. I noticed immediately that webpage loading took much longer than I'm used to. checking hotmail and gmail was annoyingly slow. Once you're used to a certain speed, it's very hard to go adjust to slower stuff.
I'm worried and frustrated. I didn't really pay attention to the fact that this machine has 2.4 ghz and my old Toshiba Laptop has 3.3ghz becuase I thought the fact that the Imac has duo core processing would make up for the difference. Apparently I was wrong. So I'm wondering what to do... I don't think I can go back to the days where downloading programs, songs, files, etc takes hours and opening simple applications and Word documents requires me staring at an hourglass or some spinning icon.
Even though my PC is 3 years old (and it was a nearly discontinued floor model when I bought it, so it's even older), and is total piece of junk in terms of reliability (i'm on my 5th motherboard), so far it's light years faster than this Imac. I'm sort of stunned because everything about this imac seems so state of the art.
Did I get a lemon or does being a mac user just mean tolerating slow processing speeds?
Apologies for the long first post. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Bloozmain
I've been working on getting up and running all evening and I've got some concerns that I'm hoping you all can help me with.
The pain of transitioning from 2 decades of PC to this Mac interface is one thing. It's hard and I have no idea why this mouse behaves the way it does and why windows keep jumping around and going gray or in and out of focus, etc... But I'm sure I will eventually tame the interface and probably come to prefer it. But that's not why I'm coming to you.
My issue is simple: performance speed. I got the imac with the 20 in screen and it seemed like a really decent machine. But so far, everything it's done has been incredibly slow. As soon as I logged and got set up for the first time I went to the apple site and tried to watch a video about Leopard. I have DSL but was unable to view either the small, medium or large version of the video without experiencing incredible choppiness. The large version was totally impossible, and I eventually had to give up on even the small version. I clicked the download link for the 379mb file, but it said it would take several hours to load. I can't remember anything taking several hours to download other than a full-length feature film. I'm used to fast and seamless video on my crappy toshiba laptop with this exact same internet connection. So that was a frustrating and confusing first experience with the imac.
Next, an update window poppped up telling me that there was a big list of updates available for various programs etc. I started the downloads and was amazed at the slow download speeds. Small updates of 15 meg or so were taking MINUTES and MINUTES to download. About 20 minutes into the updates I finally had to quit because I started the process of upgrading to Leopard and had to restart.
So, I insert the Leopard disc and the first thing that happens is that a message appears saying the Imac needed to check the leopard DVD for consistency. The little progress bar appeared and I waited... and waited. It took more than 30 minutes for the machine to "check the consistency" of the Leopard DVD, whatever that means. Finally, the disc started loading. The progress bar appeared and said it was "calculating" the remaining load time. It took about 10 full minutes to calculate the loading time and then I was appalled to see that the load time was nearly TWO HOURS!! So I left and came back an hour later... sure enough, still loading. I left again and by the time I came back another hour later, it was finally done.
So now I've got my leopard going and I figured I'd try the internet and see if I can manage the browser interface. I noticed immediately that webpage loading took much longer than I'm used to. checking hotmail and gmail was annoyingly slow. Once you're used to a certain speed, it's very hard to go adjust to slower stuff.
I'm worried and frustrated. I didn't really pay attention to the fact that this machine has 2.4 ghz and my old Toshiba Laptop has 3.3ghz becuase I thought the fact that the Imac has duo core processing would make up for the difference. Apparently I was wrong. So I'm wondering what to do... I don't think I can go back to the days where downloading programs, songs, files, etc takes hours and opening simple applications and Word documents requires me staring at an hourglass or some spinning icon.
Even though my PC is 3 years old (and it was a nearly discontinued floor model when I bought it, so it's even older), and is total piece of junk in terms of reliability (i'm on my 5th motherboard), so far it's light years faster than this Imac. I'm sort of stunned because everything about this imac seems so state of the art.
Did I get a lemon or does being a mac user just mean tolerating slow processing speeds?
Apologies for the long first post. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Bloozmain
On Tuesday, I'll let you know how things go! 
