Advice re Mac!

BobR

BobR

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My 12 year nephew bought a Mac about 9 months ago (well his Mum did) and it now sits in the corner of his room gathering dust.

I have pasted the spec below and would like to know if it is going to be practically capable of running CS3 (which it has on already). I think it might be lacking a bit in the RAM dept but would be keen for views.

Oh yes his Mum wants £350 for it as well!

Cheers,

Bob

17-inch iMac
(MA710LL)

Processor: 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

L2 Cache: 2MB Shared

Frontside Bus: 667MHz

RAM/Memory: 512MB

Hard drive: 160GB Serial ATA; 7200 rpm

Optical drive: 24x Combo Drive

Display: 17-inch (viewable) widescreen TFT active-matrix LCD, 1440 x 900 pixels, millions of colors

Video: Built-in iSight(webcam); Mini-DVI output port with support for DVI, VGA, S-video, and composite video connections via adapter

Graphics: Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory

FireWire: Two FireWire 400 ports; 8 watts shared

USB: Three USB 2.0 ports; two USB 1.1 ports (on keyboard)

Audio: Built-in stereo speakers, built-in microphone, optical digital audio output/headphone out, optical digital audio input/audio line in

Ethernet: Built-in 10/100/1000BASE-T (Gigabit)

Wireless: Built-in 54 Mbps AirPort Extreme (802.11g)3; built-in Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) module.

Hardware accessories: Apple Remote, Apple Keyboard, and Mighty Mouse

Other: Built-in IR Receiver
 
Yes, Bob, that iMac is perfectly capable of running Tiger, Leopard, and CS3. And very comfortably so if you allow yourself some more elbow room with 2GB's of RAM. Provided you've seen it in action, tested it and found it to be OK otherwise.

Prob is: the Combo drive is read-only. No CD, or DVD burning. You'd need a Superdrive for that.
If it had a Superdrive it'd be worth the 350 quid, imo.
As it is, without the burning capability, you would need it on a little LAN, or connected by FireWire to a Mac or PC that can burn optical disks, to be useful to you. Have you got that?
If you do, I'd start negotiating at 250 and end up paying 300. Or let it go.

Good luck!
 
Combo drive = CDRW
Superdrive = DVDRW/CDRW

It will be more than capable. Get yourself 2GB's of ram from overclockers.co.uk and you'll be laughing. Would negotiate £300 though.

King.
 
Yup - buy it for £300, spend £45 getting it up to 2GB and you have a cracking machine there!
 
BobR said:
My 12 year nephew bought a Mac about 9 months ago (well his Mum did) and it now sits in the corner of his room gathering dust.

I have pasted the spec below and would like to know if it is going to be practically capable of running CS3 (which it has on already). I think it might be lacking a bit in the RAM dept but would be keen for views.
Click to expand...
As has been said, this iMac will happily run the apps you want without any problems. Always better to stoc up on RAM though - PC's or Mac's, they all love RAM :)
wgdbradley said:
Mac gathering dust? Why am I not surprised?
Click to expand...
Probably because you have never used a Mac...? Don't turn this into a Mac v's PC debarcle... there are several threads on here asking about PC's and Mac's and none of them have turned into the pathetic 'Anti Mac' or 'Anti MS/PC' brigade. No need for comments thus. If you have something of value to add please do so.
 
theMusicMan said:
As has been said, this iMac will happily run the apps you want without any problems. Always better to stoc up on RAM though - PC's or Mac's, they all love RAM :)
Probably because you have never used a Mac...? Don't turn this into a Mac v's PC debarcle... there are several threads on here asking about PC's and Mac's and none of them have turned into the pathetic 'Anti Mac' or 'Anti MS/PC' brigade. No need for comments thus. If you have something of value to add please do so.
Click to expand...

Cheers for all the advice folks. I am sure all the dusty comments were meant in good humour ;).

I think I will go for RAM upgrade and give it a whirl and see if my sister will let it go for £300 - don't want to start a family fued!

Thanks again.

Bob R
 
That's a good machine and with the RAM upgrade will fly.

To be brutally honest, the intel based macs work just fine with less RAM, but you're restricted to one task at a time. I'm tying this on a Macbook with 2Gb of RAM and it only really feels MUCH faster when you cane it with something challenging, otherwise it used to zip along just fine with the 512mb.

Good machine for a good price, if you can get it for £300 then buy the RAM upgrade from www.crucial.com/uk and you'll be quids in - you could sell it tomorrow on ebay for £450, take a look!

Cheers,
James
 
Hi,I had the old G4 Powerbook and now have the Macbook pro,i run CS2 on both and dont notice any difference between the two.
 
You should be able to go to 3Gb even if it says 2Gb on Apple's site (like the old Macbook pro) but I would say 2Gb will do with CS3. There are lots of places to go with for the RAM but having looked around www.scan.co.uk and strangley! direct from CRUCIAL were very good for price.

I have an old 12" iBook 1.33GHz G4 with 1.5Gb of Ram and this works fine for most things within photoshop so you shouldn't have many problems. My main machine is a quad Xeon 2.66Ghz Mac pro with 6Gb of ram and 2.25Tb of hard drive. Bizarely unless you are doing some severe manipulation there is little difference.

Mac OS is very efficient and will run very well even on slightly slower machines, they will run with 512Mb of ram but it will feel very slow, 1Gb will make the machine run and feel much quicker BUT as soon as you hit 1.5Gb/2Gb it really starts to move. Any more than that you get a speed benefit but not as big as with the first jump in RAM.

The built in Apps are also very good. There is very little to choose between iPhoto and Aperature even for a photographer. iPhoto handles the RAW files from my D200 and I wouldn't have bought Aperature other than the fact that I aready had it. The combination of iPhoto and CS3 really rocks. If you are new to CS3 then there are some fantastic books which can really help my two favourite are "How to cheat at Photoshop CS3" and "Adobe photoshop CS3 for photographers."

Oh and WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE !!!!
 
cowasaki said:
[...] There is very little to choose between iPhoto and Aperature even for a photographer.

[...]
Click to expand...

Oh yeah?
If you need more you simply click this, and get 700 more apps to play around with . . .

That ought to keep you busy for a while.

Have fun!
 
cowasaki said:
There is very little to choose between iPhoto and Aperature even for a photographer.
Click to expand...

That really is crazy talk. iPhoto has nothing on Aperture. Its a completely different beast. Sure iPhoto can process a RAW file, on a basic level. Aperture has far more controls for fine tuning a RAW file. Its also got far better library management tools, gallery tools, exporting and so on. It is designed for the professional photographer, iPhoto isn't. Personally I use Lightroom as its faster. I do use iPhoto but simply for collecting my fave images in a quick app.
 
petemc said:
That really is crazy talk. iPhoto has nothing on Aperture. Its a completely different beast. Sure iPhoto can process a RAW file, on a basic level. Aperture has far more controls for fine tuning a RAW file. Its also got far better library management tools, gallery tools, exporting and so on. It is designed for the professional photographer, iPhoto isn't. Personally I use Lightroom as its faster. I do use iPhoto but simply for collecting my fave images in a quick app.
Click to expand...

Maybe I should have explained a bit more but if you have CS3 then most of the RAW manipulation can be carried out with that rather than Aperture. I prefer photoshop to aperture for most things that both can do. As for the organisation of photos well they both do it and yes Aperture is better but for most non professionals it is too expensive for just a photo organiser. Aperture WOULD be good value if you didnt have photoshop.
 
cowasaki said:
Maybe I should have explained a bit more but if you have CS3 then most of the RAW manipulation can be carried out with that rather than Aperture.
Click to expand...

While true, I would say you are missing the point of Aperture or Lightroom. You don't need Photoshop as much when using them. With Lightroom I can drop in a days work and have them all converted to black and white and keyworded with IPTC metadata within 10 minutes. The beauty of these programs is that its all self contained non-destructive editing. I hardly use Photoshop these days as I can do everything in Lightroom. I can undo everything too. Its all neatly organised in one app.
 
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