Another iMac 20" duo user report

umm thats not good.



and what are u talking about start up sound?


its the same chime right?

If Apple Hardware Test does not run, then clearly, your model is defective, and as such, your observations about general performance are moot, since the machine isn't general -- it's broken. Wipe your data and call Apple Support for a replacement.

*****

Elixir: It's the same startup chime, yes. The volume depends on what you left your volume at inside OS X itself -- just like on PowerPC Macs. In other words, nothing has changed. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I've had an 17" iMac Core Duo for 24 hrs and have none of those problems at all, perhaps because I didn't use a migration assistant (which I never trust anyway).

On the contrary, I'm impressed at iLife 06's stability, especially before any .0.x updates. I've loaded 29,000+ photos into iPhoto without a crash, and am very impressed at how Front Row can slideshow them so responsively. Much better than it did with an, ahem, hacked copy on my dual 2.5 Power Mac G5 which the iMac is set up next to.

Airport on a 802.11b/g router with WPA security has been fine, usually gets the signal coming out of sleep within 10 secs. Safari hasn't crashed yet.

Gone through every System Pref panel setting them the way I like it and none have crashed. Including the "Processor" panel which is added after installing Xcode and the CHUD tools from the included DVDs. Very stable.

Haven't shut it down more than once so can't say if the startup chime varies in volume.

Main annoyance so far has been non-playment of DivX .avi files, but then I found the beta DivX 6 codec, so all is well, except they sometimes don't work in Front Row quite right (the beta page mentions this, but they did actually work well enough for me to watch Friday's Battlestar Galactica through Front Row - and no I don't consider it piracy if there is no avenue in my country to buy it...).

And sometimes the infrared controller takes more than one click to get the Front Row menu up, although it always brings the iMac out of sleep fine. One trick I've found with Front Row is that if the menu button doesn't seem to be switching into it from the normal Mac UI, push the up button to alter the volume a notch, then try.

Advice: do a factory restore, don't let any stupid migration assistant muck around with your prefs, Library settings or app support folders. (Remember that in many cases you'll be going from both earlier versions of apps AND on a different architecture.) And remember the mantra: I'm a sacrificial guinea pig on the altar of Apple's transition to Intel!

Maybe if I didn't still have my G5 next to it I'd be less impressed trying to use it as my main machine, but so far it's great.

Had a chance to muck about a bit today on a 20" Intel iMac, gig of ram.

Three 720p movies running, 8 tracks of garage band running, Safari downloading, iWeb open, Keynote open with templates up, and then I started moving things around in iPhoto.

And it didn't seem to mind at all. Works for me.

I had a weird thing happen with my 20" iMac intel. When I installed Flash 8, the installer asked to install Flash player 8 so I said sure... After relaunching Safari, I had no Flash player at all. It was working fine before. Went over to Macromedia and tried to download it. But to my surprise, the download page said they had no idea which player I needed, as in not recognizing my browser. Still haven't got it working.

It's a little difficult to develop Flash content when you can't view it. Anyone have any suggestions?

M Stone

About the reconnecting to airport problem-- have you tried to change the settings in System Prefs/network about joining a preferred network? Might help-- I did this on my powerbook at some point because my powerbook stopped automatically connecting.

Ugh. Flash 8 nuked your native player. For now you should be able to launch Safari in Rosetta mode (Get Info on Safari and check "open in rosetta") in order to use it. But Flash will be slow that way. You need to uninstall that gimped ppc version of flash player and get the original intel player back in place. I can't help with the flash 8 uninstall, but anyone with a new imac ought to be able to mail you the flash plugin for safari.

In case anyone else makes the same mistake of overwriting their Flash plugin on the intel duo machine, I have linked to a copy of the original replacement files which I have placed on my website. As far as I can tell there is no other way to aquire these files other than restoring the HD from the install discs, which is what I did.

http://www.stoneworks.com/macromedia_save.zip

hope this helps

M

Whoa, that sleep problem is serious. I'd try reformatting the HD and doing a nice clean reinstall. If the problem persists, take that lemon back for a new one.

on my 17" Intel iMac, wake from sleep isn't as problematic but it isn't always smooth either. Rosetta apps can really slow everything down. Beachballs everywhere.

And fast user switching? ha! My mac mini handles multiple profiles much better (smooth like butter). But it could be the ram issue, iMac with 512mb, Mini with a gig.

If migration assistant is dodgy, what is the best way for me to migrate from a PB G4 to MBP? Normally I'd use Target Disk Mode but obviously I'm now switching architecture too.

Any ideas?

From what's being reported it appears that Intel Mac + Rosetta + as much ram as you can cram in there= significantly improved performance (more so than the usual "throw ram at it" in the Power PC models).

What problems are you guys seeing with the Migration Assistant? I've always had it work fine for me, when run during the install.

I'm testing out a Mactel iMac too. I like the speed up of many of the operations, but there is a lot a memory swapping going on with just 512 MEGs of RAM.

The major problems that I'm running into are:

Can't print to my old HP 4M/P printer. Can print to it from two other late model Mac's. Can't get it to work from this new box. The printer light will blink twice, then nothing happens. I did get one page of postscript gibberish to come out and that's it. My other Macs have a specific driver for the HP 4m/P but can find it on this new system. Generic post script should work too, but just stalls out.

None of the add-on programs that have pref-pane items for the control panel work.

Cannot get iChat Video to work. That was the major deciding factor for getting this new box. Other feed back I got said that this is a major problem with all Mac systems. Video chat very seldom works from what others on this board have said.

Lastly one of my cell phones won't let me browse the files on it. This seems to be a Verizon problem not phone (Motorola E815). If anyone has got a work around this let me know.

Here are the programs that I have tested that work: FireFox, OnSync (for my cell phones), Keyboard Masetro, Pather Finder 4.0.1, VNCDimension (wish this would get updated as I use VNC a lot and this one works well with my PCs), Adium, EyeTV (playback of files recorded on my Mac Mini then copied over to this box), SharePoints (but the pref Pane shows up but when you click it says "Can't run on this system contact the software vendor"), OSXvnc, Chicken of the VNC (great for Mac to Mac - Stinks for Mac to PC), Snapz Pro 2.0, Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.5, Google Earth and Easy Find.

Other than that really suprised how well this guy works. Like the compact size.

-Scott

You didn't happen to be the TV engineer at a small university in Northwest Missouri a few years ago did you?

Hi Guartho, Not me, never been to Missouri.

Well you should, it's a lovely state.

My first couple of years in college our TV Engineer was a big Mac guy. He bought his first Apple from Jobs and Woz at a computer fair in California. Anyway, his name was Scott and he had a tendency to refer to computers and pieces of hardware as "this guy," so I thought you might be him.