Thread: Dell or Imac

Originally Posted by vnx205

It is all still original as far as I know. I only acquired it when it was being thrown out a couple of years ago to replace my 10 year old machine.
It is an Acer Veriton 5200, Pentium 4, 1.7Gh, 512 M ram - certainly nothing special by today's standards. With Xubuntu, it seems to be mostly about as fast as machines only a couple of years old running XP, so it's good enough.
Actually there is one addition. i did what I have done a couple of times before. I just added the drive from my previous machine as a second drive to save the effort of transferring files. I couldn't be bothered investigating the proper way of transferring things from the old machine to the new one.

Well according to this page the memory has been upgraded from 128mb, and they only came with a CD drive and a 20gb hard disk If I were you I'd be very careful about maintaining a good backup because you're on borrowed time. Any hard disk older than 5 years is a ticking time bomb.

Just by the way, Apple include a function called the migration assistant to enable people to easily move from one mac to another. The date on that article is 2005 so it's been around for a while now.

I've used this a couple of times and it works **really** well. Get your new computer and plug it into the old one. Come back 45 minutes later and job done. Also note that Apple (well BSD UNIX) provide the utilities to wipe your old computer to military specifications!

Originally Posted by Tombie2

As a side note. My old man has been using PCs at work for 15 years, excel, outlook etc... hated them... Struggled...
At home tried to make a photo dvd of a trip, struggled... gave up..

got him a mac, mini... now he makes DVDs with soundtracks, emails like mad, chats to family in UK online... etc..

Made a massive difference to him...

This is exactly what I have been trying to say. A friend in Melb had all the usual windows/pc hassles and finally listened to me and got a mac. He was so impressed with it that within two weeks he had his parents get one and they have a similar story. Finally they are getting real value out of technology.

I used to have a constant stream of support calls from my family network. I now have the entire family on macs and no more support. YAAY!

Here are some mixed up comments.
If you want performance, Dell is not the way to go, you need to build your own custom or from a pc shop. Mac is like driving a Defender, it's a life style choice! IBM is upgradeable, Mac is not that easy, and IBM you can fix yourself, MAC no-go! I've never had a Mac, but would not mind trying one for my next big upgrade. Then again it's not about Dell or Mac, it's more windows or the Mac os. You can run anything on a Mac that you can on a windows box, you may just have to tweak or purchase the virtual desktop software.
Good luck.