After much deliberation, I took a day off today, and treated myself to a new 2.7Ghz i5 21.5" iMac, with 1TB HD My first foray into the all-in-one system, I've had Mac towers since Quadra days.

It's terrific, I tried out the 27" monsters at an Apple shop today, but thought they'd be too big for the office, 21.5 seems just right (dwarfing my dual 17" PC screens!). Very impressed so far... display is gorgeous, just need a day to install CS3 and all the other apps. Then a week to migrate multiple HDDs of files from my old systems. No major issue with reflections yet either, I only notice it when the display is off/black.

Although far more minimally packed than the Macs long ago, the packaging is still a work of art, I've never come across anything to rival it since my first new Mac in the early 1990s.

Couple of Qs before I go:

Is it worth bumping the RAM from 4GB yet, not really had time to explore, would it make a big difference to Photoshop and InDesign?

Are people still partitioning HDs today? Tempted to set-up a smaller partition for the system, then one for photographic work and one for all other files... if I can do it live without a reinstall... After all 1TB is pretty big, my biggest files will be RAW camera images before conversion.

Yeah, I'd suggest a RAM bump - being 64 bit means you'll really appreciate the difference.
As for partitioning - why? What's the point under OS X?

Anyway, enjoy the new shiny!

Yes, absolutely, for general use as well as for graphics apps. Especially since it's a relatively cheap type of RAM. However I think you only have 2 RAM slots and they're both filled initially, so you can't reuse any RAM that's in there. By default you have 2 GB boards in both slots, so you'll need to buy at least 4GB boards to see any benefit. I think Crucial are doing 4GB ones for about 35 quid - I'd replace both the two you have with 4s, then possibly shove the 2s on eBay. They're a standard part so you might get a buyer.


You don't need to and there's a bit of fiddling to put your home folder on a different partition but it does make life easier. You'd have to do that straight away though - IIRC disk utility can't yet shrink a partition without wiping it. You could cheat and use Bootcamp assistant which I think can shrink your disk without wiping it, then format the new partition as a mac disk rather than a PC one. Your other choice is partition & reinstall, which if you're going to do it, do it ASAP.

Jon

My mid-2010 model has four slots for a total of 16GB, I'd guess this is the same?

I may be wrong actually. It used to be the case that the 21" models had two RAM slots and the 27" ones had four. They may have changed that at some point or other. Worth having a look in system profiler to check.

The important point is I'd say to do production graphic editing I the expense of getting another 4GB well pays off in terms of system responsiveness. If you do have four slots I'd say you could maybe get away with buying another 2GB one to get to 6, but the price difference is such you might as well just buy a 4GB anyway.

Jon

The 21.5" has 4 slots. I've got 4x 2GB in my one.

You need to add RAM in pairs so it runs in dual channel mode for maximum speed.

I opted for 2x4Gb so that I have some upgrading options in future. If I went for the cheaper option I would have had to sell memory to create space.

We've got an unused upgrade to Adobe CS4 Design Standard (from CS3) - a customer order that was cancelled. As far as we know it's not been installed on anything, but the plastic wrap has been opened. Was thinking about putting this in the For Sale thread, but if you're interested make me an offer by PM.

Thanks all, yep it's got 4 slots, 2 are empty. There was some coverage saying that although OS X is 64-bit, much still runs in 32-bit mode, was in a MacUser article recently, will try and dig it out...

I'm considering partitioning using bootcamp before I add all my apps as mentioned above, then formatting as Mac rather than Windows for the large data partition, do you think 100GB is enough for the system partition? My old system (stuffed with apps on Tiger) only consumes 40GB...

Nice one!

Very jealous!

If I were you I wouldn't bother partitioning the system. With only one HDD if it goes caput then partitioning isn't going to save anything and most of the apps available manage their data very well without you having to do much. Combined with Time Machine it removes the need to partition.

My only experience with partitioning (OK this is from Windows) is that smoe programs store things in their own directory anyway and so I get bits of data all over the place.

BTW, you also get a free update to Lion when it comes out You're just inside the free upgrade period that they've started.

Thanks Fogmeister, I guess partitioning is a habit I've always had, have 2 internal drives with 4 partitions on my PC and the same on my other Mac, I do like just to clone/backup data partitions, and also some separation of data I've found useful, as I never use home/standard folders, but perhaps I'll give the iMac a go without, at mo haven't installed anything too busy with work today

Great re. the free update, as long as it doesn't break my apps, I guess that's another useful reason to partition, to have different systems to boot from on different partition (I have 2 versions of OS X and one OS 9 on my G4, I still use OS 9 exclusively for slide-scanning, as my dedicated SCSI 35mm scanner isn't OS X compat )