Opinions on customization

Thanks to some encouragement from board members I have decided to go ahead and buy a new 20" IMac asap. I'm now looking for opinions as to whether any of the customizations offered (harddrive, memory, processor) would help me have a better experience.

I need to run five or six different browsers simultaneously along with one or two chat programs at all times. I'll also sometimes be working in Dreamweaver or Photoshop or GarageBand and also have other little programs like FTP and TextEdit running. I'm also going to store about 50GB of music and a few thousand photos on there and I want to be able to add to that.

The question is, is the stadard version good to go for what I want it for or am I asking too much. I want it to run fast at all times--I hate pauses when I am switching between applications.

Any input is appreciated. Thanks,
Rusty

yes you can upgrade the memory easily but the hard drive would be a bit harder to do cause you would have to take it all apart

I'm talking about the standard customizations that apple offers. You can buy the IMac with an upgraded hard drive. I'm wondering if any of those standard customizations would improve performance dramatically given what I want it to do.

Rusty

You will probably want to upgrade your ram to at least 2g and possibly go with the larger hard drive.

yes memory for sure those programs eat up lots of memory cause they arent writen in universal code yet (besides whats included with you system)

if you are going to do all that at once i would suggest you upgrade your memory and your hard drive.

now i would have apple install the hard drive for you

and iwould suggest buying your ram from a third party place and installing it yourself, will save you money
-chris

i just bought one with a bunch of upgrades...i got the larger hd, better video card and 2 gigs of ram. I got an educational discount.....but after i searched for prices of ram, apple is not overpriced...plus it will be covered under the applecare i purchased witht he unit

Thanks for the responses.

Rusty

I have had my 20" iMac for a few months now, I purchased a customised model.

I stayed with the 2.16GHz C2D Processor and also went with the 256MB Graphics card, 250GB HD, 1GB Ram.

Like you, I was wanting to use my iMac for programs such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop etc. as well as a fair bit of music, video's and pictures.

I wasn't too bothered about maxing out the Ram because you can always upgrade that your self at a later date. But I got the 250GB HD and 256MB Graphics card simply because I prefer to have more than I need for the moment than to get say a few more months down the line and realise I need more space, or that the graphics card is not powerful enough.

Bottom line I would say is that if you can afford it, go for better than what you need. This way you will leave yourself some leeway for the future.

Hope this helps (btw, a few months on and I'm still loving my iMac, it's like my right arm, I'm lost without it! Also, the bluetooth keyboard & mighty mouse are pretty neat too )

Regards,

Chris :mac:

Buy 2 gig of RAM and upgrade the hard drive if you really think you're going to exceed 250gig any time soon. You can always add an external firewire hard drive at a later date.

For what you're doing the IMac will be fine, although Photoshop might frustrate you at times as it's not a Universal Intel app.

The only reason to upgrade the graphics card is if you're into games or 3D rendering.

2 gigs of ram?

Long time Windows-afficionado, recent iMac... inheritor or something, and 2 gigs of memory for browsers, imaging apps, and ftp clients? My HP XPMCE runs with 1GB memory and can easily handle all of the following at once:

Mozilla Firefox (with 5 tabs actively refreshing)
Mozilla Thunderbird (checking for mail on the minute)
SmartFTP (FTP client, transferring data to a web server)
Dreamweaver (with me tinkering with HTML)
Zen Developer (with me tinkering with PHP)

And it can do so quite easily. Why would 2 gigs of RAM be necessary for something like this (beyond the obvious reason of wanting as much memory as possible)?

There is a fundamental difference in RAM management between Windows XP and Macs OS X. When running several applications in a Mac the operating system (OS X) will move the inactive programs to the swap partition which is dynamically created in your HDD(you need to have a certain amount of free space). The active programs will be written in RAM. If you are working with several programs in parallel obviously you need more RAM than running a single Application at a given time. ie. If you have more RAM you will be able to run more apps. simultaneously.