I just realized I hadn’t posted here about the saga of my iMac ownership…

Lets just say that the relationship was short lived. First, the Mac was misrepresented by the eBay seller who sold it to me. I do not think it was his intentions to misrepresent the Mac, I think he was just ignorant to the different models. Let me clarify.

What I thought I was bidding on when I won the auction:

2008 model Core2Duo, 2GB RAM 250GB HDD

What I actually got:

Early 2006 model CoreDuo, 2GB RAM 250GB HDD

The biggest difference? Well, the Core2Duo is up to 20%% faster than the CoreDuo clock for clock. Also, the Core2Duo is 64-bit whereas the CoreDuo is 32-bit. That’s a pretty important “2″.

The Early 2006 iMac (due to a very poor choice in chipset) is limited to 2GB of RAM maximum.

Initially, I was willing to just accept that I had made a less than ideal purchase, and live with it since I wanted a Mac so badly, but ultimately, I had to part ways. I was bummed out ( a little), but I had a Mac!

The machine ran well under Tiger, but less and less software is supporting Tiger – under Leopard, after some usage, I started seeing the “Beach Ball” pretty regularly. For those who aren’t Mac Savvy, the “Beach Ball” is the multi-colored spinning “Busy Cursor”. VMware Fusion was practically unusable for me – doing anything in a Virtual Machine was a slow and painful task, in fact, just simply having Mail, Firefox (or Safari), a Twitter Client, an IRC client and a media player open all at the same time would slowly bring the machine to it’s knees. It was even slow to scroll through graphically intense web pages (ok – even Google Reader was *slow*).

I’ve always had “snappy” PC’s, and I hadn’t experienced using a computer that slow in a very long time, and I just couldn’t take it any longer – even if it was a Mac. I knew I could hit up NewEgg and for less than $300 build a machine that was at least 4x as fast as that Mac I just paid over $600 for! I made a bad purchase, and I had to either live with it, or sell it while I could still get out of it what I had in it.

Sadly, I listed it back on eBay, and I was lucky enough to find a buyer, and ended up making a whopping $10 profit, so I’m happy As slow as it was, and as aggravated as I was getting with it, I was still sad to box it up and send it on it’s way.

But now what?

I liked having the “Quad Core Monster” downstairs. It was more convinent – for one thing, it gave Mom a decent machine to use - she’d always been stuck with my old machines – she’s always making comments about how fast that computer is, and how she actually enjoys using it, so I didn’t want to take that away from her. Should I build another machine? One thing I liked about the iMac was that it ran cool, and ran quiet. I didn’t have a hulking tower that sounded like a vacuum sitting next too me – downstairs is generally 10 degree’s cooler, and I can keep the fans in the Antec 900 all on low and the “Quad” still runs cooler than it ran up here with all 5 fans spinning away on “high”. I like it where it’s at now – downstairs, a “catch-all” family PC – it holds my music, our family pictures and our important data on a secure RAID-1 – also it serves as a VMware Host for times I want to fire off some VM’s andplay around with Linux and it’s always just an RDP session or a trip to the Dining Room away.

I got creative with some “wishlists” on NewEgg- I toyed around with stuff I’d never considered before – small form factor stuff, MiniITX motherboards, MicroATX boards, low voltage CPU’s – Video cards that didn’t require 6-pin power connectors of their own. I was even researching the power consumption of various hard drives. I wanted to create something that would be fast, but also cool and quiet. The down-side was I didn’t want to go over the $650 I had in PayPal after re-selling the iMac, and I was also budgeting for a 2nd monitor, because I’d grown to really love having dual-displays here at home since having the iMac.

Then it hit me – why not see what I could get in a Notebook PC! I did some looking around, and I was amazed at what I could get in that price range. I tossed some options around, and ultimately wound up purchasing a nice Lenovo from NewEgg…2.2GHz Core2Duo, 64-bit Vista Home Premium, 4GB of RAM, 250GB HDD, 15.4″ LED lit screen, DL-DVD Burner, HDMI, the thing even (supposedly) has a built-in 4.1 sound system with a “sub-woofer” (yes the picture on NewEgg shows a “speaker” on the bottom that is the “sub”). It even has face recognition log-in. All for $549+Free Shipping (on sale from $749). That’s an unbelievable deal in my opinion, and should serve me well for a long time. I know Lenovo makes quality notebooks, and they will hold up for the long haul.

This will be the first time I will have used a notebook as my main “go-to” machine, but I’m looking forward to the flexibility it should give me – I can sit here at my desk and hang my 22″ LCD off of it for a nice dual monitor setup or I can “grab it and go” if I want to sit out back in the shade, or downstairs while watching TV – I can just take it with me.

I’m really looking forward too it. I feel  like I’m waiting on Santa Claus

P.S. Look at the specs of that Lenovo (which is a quality notebook in build quality) and then hit up Apple’s web site for comparison and then try to tell me there is no such thing as an “Apple Tax”. You can’t even buy a bare bones Apple Mini for less than $600 (ok, so it’s $1 less), and the least expensive notebook is the $999 “white” Macbook, and that’s with a smaller screen, a (slightly) slower CPU, half the RAM and 90GB less hard drive space.