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Post by artraveler on May 11, 2020 7:38:00 GMT -8
I purchased a new computer about six weeks ago. It is an iMac with a 21-inch screen 3.8 GHz Quad core, 8 gig. This is to replace the machine I have had for the last six years. It is not that my old iMac was defective, but it was slow. That slowness is very evident compared with this computer.
Apple makes changing from one apple computer user friendly through their iCloud service. I did have to reinstall Microsoft office software. It is not that the iMac office tools are faulty, but I’m more familiar with the office tools.
The operation is smooth, and I really like the wireless mouse 2, rechargeable and keyboard, although with my fingers the keyboard is a little small. Apple offered me $150 for my old mac, mostly to recycle. However, I have decided to gift it to my grandson, age 16. I think he will get good use from it.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 21, 2020 8:14:20 GMT -8
Congrats on the new iMac, Artler. I would have delved into this thread earlier but I missed it. I’m still running on my 2011 iMac. Knock on wood, it will continue to operate for some time. I’ve upgraded here and there where I could, including RAM.
I’m booted off a solid state drive (SSD) which a friend hooked me up with a couple years ago. That was a yuge improvement. It’s an external drive connected via Thunderbolt. I also recently added a CalDigit dock which gave me some drive expansion options, used mostly for backup purposes. This was prompted by my internal drive going out recently. It was no big deal since I was already booting off an external drive. But getting in and replacing that drive is not for the fainthearted.
But, yeah, at some point the newer software and web browsers (being bloatware, basically) tend to drag down old hardware. That 8 gigs of RAM sounds about perfect. That should handle all you need and you can easily upgrade it as well.
Likely your iMac comes with a “Fusion” drive which is a hybrid of SSD and mechanical hard drive. Those can work well. Also note that swapping in (or adding on) a solid state drive is fairly cheap and painless….at least an external one. It might be great to use one of those for a “Time Machine” backup. That software really works well.
Apple keyboards were made for some strange alien race that doesn’t like to actually feel the key presses. Their more “chicklet” style keyboards are the pits. But yutes are driving this so I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s actually difficult to find a good replacement.
I used to have Windows 7 running on a BootCamp partition. I had older versions of Word, Excel, etc. but it was all I needed. That went down when the internal drive went out. But all I really used it for was converting customer Word documents to pdfs for the platemaker. But I can do that conversion for free online now and this actually does a better job. But it still would be nice to have Microsoft Office. Where did you get yours? How much does it cost? And where did you buy your new iMac? Just curious.
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Post by artraveler on May 21, 2020 20:04:23 GMT -8
I use both my Mac and a PC. For my increasingly not as nimble fingers I have large print keyboards for both. The mini Apple keyboard is handy if I want to hold it in my lap while writing, something I do less and less. Amazon sells these keywords at about $20. I hate it that they are made in China. I run a 3 gig backup external drive and backup the system every hour. I also keep a 2 gig external drive for files I don't want on the computer taking up space. I run Norton anti-virus software to keep the bugs out and that plus Apple is not as vulnerable to intrusion as PC seems to work. I also run Norton on the PC. Our local provider of internet is Cox and they maintain downloads at about 150 mg which is more than adequate for my uses.
I bought the Microsoft Office software for Apple OS from Microsoft if I remember correctly about $100, mostly because I like word better than pages and excel better than numbers. I suppose it just what you get used to. I have had the new iMac for about 2 months now and no problems. One of the things I like is it is possible to set the machine to turn itself on every morning so it is ready for me to log on when I get up. One thing I always do now is create an admin account separate from mine. I have found in the past PC years that is a good way to backdoor if for some reason my account is faulty. Since everything Important is either in the iCloud or external drives I feel reasonably confident of not losing anything I want to keep.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 22, 2020 8:02:33 GMT -8
That sounds like a good idea. What I’d really like to get is a lighted keyboard.
Sounds as if your backup and security needs are met and you’re probably ahead of 95% of Mac users out there (including me). But I do have an external 2 TB FireWire drive with one 1 TB partition of it set as a Time Machine backup drive. It works well and has saved my bacon more than once when I needed to find a file I had thrown away or overwritten. The bigger the drive, the more you can back up. But this 1TB gives me the ability to retrieve anything back to April of 2014. The other partition is a bootable installation of Mavericks (OS 10.9.5). Another save-your-bacon option.
I used to have the Mac version of Word, but that was years ago and it wouldn’t work now. For what little word processing I do, I just use the good old TextEdit.
Yeah, why not. I don’t do that but it makes sense. I’ve got some other built-in backups as well. I have a 250 GB Thunderbolt SSD drive (which also has a USB connection) connected to my CalDigit dock. I will on a regular basis clone (using Carbon Copy Cloner) my boot drive onto it. Should the boot drive go out, I can swap that in immediately.
My main boot drive itself is a 500 GB version of that same Thunderbolt SSD drive that is connected to a Thunderbolt port on the back of my iMac. It’s divided into two partitions. One is my boot drive (OS X Mavericks). The other has High Sierra on it — which is as far as I can go regarding operating systems on this 2011 iMac. I can boot into High Sierra just to check it out and see what it breaks. It breaks most of the Adobe software so that’s why I’m sort of stuck in OS X Mavericks — unless I want to go on the Adobe subscription software bandwagon, which I don’t.
I also for good measure have a Samsung 1 TB SSD plugged into the CalDigit dock upon which I also clone my entire system (including jobs files).
Should the iMac itself fail, I could just plug my Thunderbolt drive into a new (well, old) iMac and be up and running again. But I’d have to find a used system on eBay that could still run Mavericks.
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