Looking for a second hand iMac - any tips please?

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Looking for a second hand iMac - any tips please?

Hi All

Due to work I have primarily been to the dark side in the last few years, with just a Mk 1 Mac Mini for my photos and videos. Its almost crawling now, so its time for an iMac I think.

I don't want anything too crazy, but I wasn't sure what amount of RAM would be good to run Snow Leopard? I wouldn't be doing any crazy photoshop stuff, maybe a bit of HD stuff in iMovie plus the usual iTunes & iPhoto usage, but I have no idea how much Snow Leopard really needs to run smooth with a few apps open.

I run an online business and in the end I switched back to PC as I've always found Macs to be pretty slow for browsing, I'm guessing thats probably changed now?

Anyway, any help or advice would be great. I'm probably gonna look for second hand so any suggestions (eBay UK etc) would be great!

Many thanks
Mark

Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.4.11), 1.13 GHz PPC G4 Processor, 512mb RAM

Posted on Jul 25, 2010 2:38 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 25, 2010 2:50 PM in response to Mark Norton1

I'd really suggest just looking at Apple's refurb selection. Couple hundred off the top, same warranty, and you know you're going to be getting something of quality. Buy off a place like ebay, you never know what you're going to end up with. There are probably a lot of honest sellers on ebay, but it just takes one not so honest person to really ruin things for you.

And Snow Leopard actually runs pretty well on 2GB of RAM. Runs reasonably well on only 1GB actually, but 2GB gets into the fabled "butter zone". I'd suggest probably 3-4GB if you're going to be doing any kind of video editing.

So any 2009 21.5" iMac should fit the bill nicely for you.

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