Recently switched to 17" iMac

I won't bore everyone with a review so I'll just say that the iMac is a great computer, we love iLife and I have upgraded the RAM to 2GB...trying to figure out what to do with a 200pin 512 MB SO-DIMM...hopefully buy another Mac to put it in someday.

As my wife enjoys her new mac I was working on her sisters PC. Preloaded with garabage by HP she has been using it for about a year and it needs to be cleaned up. It is a nice little workstation so I have donned the IT cap once again and should have it running like a champ in a couple of days (lots of spyware, adware & just plain extra garbage on the PC). Since she moved in with us I wanted her PC to be cleaned up if it was going to be on my network. What's the point of saying this? Well I am happy that we now have a Mac and I don't have to deal with any of that anymore.

Welcome Wedge!

Congrats, but don't make it sound like maintaining a PC is as hard as people say. Don't install crap, use the built in Firewall, and you should be good.

Welcome to the world of macs! You'll love it.

BTW you could try running Linux on the laptop.

Welcome.

Well it has been about a week since I put together this post and the iMac will be returning to the applestore tomorrow.

I started another thread in OS-X about kernel panics and have determined that it is not software related so back it goes. It also isn't RAM related. I am a little upset since I bought the mac so I wouldn't have to deal with these issues. I am also upset that I can't make an appointment at the applestore until midnight, online only (considering I usually go to bed around 9:30 or 10 this is a pretty big inconvience to me).

So right now I have a $1200 paper weight. Hopefully they can fix it soon. I still have to get all of my data off of the iMac, I am going to try and use MacDrive and my laptop and use the iMac in FWTDM. The only backup solution that would have worked is to back-up every half hour because it went down hard on a saturday afternoon as I was in the process of uploading pictures and CDs from my camera. What is the point of having a HD if you have to back it up on "floppies" every 20 minutes.

So my mac experience has been pretty awful. Plus I am going to have to call up microsoft to get a new key for Office 2004 since the harddrive will be wiped before I bring it to the apple store as a last ditch effort (more to prove 100% that it is not a software issue).

I think that the quality control went way down in order to get all of the shipments out. I would have rather waited for a quality product than bought this. The only thing that keeps me from actually returning the mac is I like OSX and it was for my wife, who uses a mac at school (iMac G4).

AndrewG, you are correct, maintaining a PC is not that difficult and I have actually never had a major problem with one. Cleaning up a spyware'd machine is time consuming but not that bad and I have only had to do that on family's computers not on my own since i just run the appropriate software at night when I am asleep and use "safe" internet practices. Any time I did I was able to correct it myself. This is what really makes the mac experience so bad for me.

Sorry for the rant, but my introduction to the mac has been less than great.

Wedge I know what you mean.
My macbook that I have received just last thursday is in repair as well (since yesterday).
Though I am a bit disappointed, I am just hoping that they will fix it, so I can find a swift resolution. Lucky for me though, I did not buy any additional software, nor stored any data. So I guess that part really is the painful. However I hope everything works out great.