My four year old G4 iMac is dying. It crashes all the time with graphic card errors. My hard drive is also slowly dying, and has numerous unrecoverable errors. And of course the constant rebooting is probably turning my hard drive filesystem to swiss cheese.
I took my iMac in to Tekserve, a well-known Mac shop by my gym. They estimated it would cost around $550 to repair everything. For a 4-year-old iMac, that's a bit much. So I lugged my iMac back home and considered my next move. First of all, though, I noticed they had changed my desktop settings, so I was now using thousands of colors, instead of millions. This seems to be have been a smart move, and the crashes have been much less frequent after they did this.
At any rate, I still want to replace my iMac. The question is, to what? One possibility is a laptop. However, I don't really have a laptop lifestyle. So the other possibilities are a G5 iMac, and a Power Mac. I'm a little reluctant to get a G5 iMac, since reportedly it runs quite hot, and component and disk drive failures are common. Even the second-generation iMacs, which fixed many of the reliability problems of the first generation, still seems to have some problems. On the other hand, the PowerMacs are really for power users, which I am not, although I do occasionally do some video editing.
The price is really bothering me, though. I can get a pretty nice iMac for less than $2000. A comparatively nice PowerMac runs around $2500 without a monitor, although that does have the extra processor. I don't need the expandability of the PowerMac, but I'm afraid of reliability problems in the iMac. What should I do?
Posted by ahyatt at December 9, 2005 07:05 PMWait until after January for a Mactel PowerBook? That's probably what I'll get for my next computer.
Posted by: Brian Marston on December 10, 2005 10:14 AM