New iMac plan...look OK?
I currently have an early 2008 24" iMac.
I am upgrading to a BTO 27" iMac that should be shipping shortly - except for memory (stock 4GB only), it has the top available specs including 3.4Ghz quad core i7 with 2TG HD and 256GB SSD and 2GB graphics card.
Here is my deployment plan: would appreciate any comments on if this looks OK or could be improved in any way:
- Confirm correct configuration, mainly that the OS (Lion) is on SSD (this iMac is supposed to be configured with OS on the SSD). Anything else to check (do I need to check latest EFI, or should that be safe to assume?)
- Boot from DVD with memtest86 to confirm stock iMAC and its 4GB RAM is OK. I was planning to run for 24 hours.
- Replace stock 4GB iMAC ram (2x2GB) with 16GB Samsung OEM RAM from ordered from OWC (4x4GB).
- Re-run memtest86 with new RAM for another 24 hours. (I hope the originally-reported memory problems with 2010 iMacs and earlier 2011 iMacs have been fixed by now; haven't seen any recent issues reported when using OWC Samsung OEM RAM).
- Partition 256SSD with bootcamp to run Win7 (see next step for partition size).
- Win7 partition size=55GB. Don't criticize this value without evidence. MS support says min. required disk size for Win7 is 20GB (for 64bit). I will only run one main program on Windows (plus a couple other programs for occassional use, like Chrome and Adobe Reader). Even allowing for some extra space for SSD inefficiencies, I can't see how this value (55GB) would be too small. So if you disagree, please don't bother commenting WITHOUT SOME KIND OF EVIDENCE.
- Install Win7 on its SSD partition and make sure all runs OK.
- 2TB hard disk will be for Lion only (can't see a need for another partition usable by Windows, so I wasn't therefore planning on adding any FAT or NTFS partition) - if you think I SHOULD add a partition for Windows on the HD, please advise.
- Move my Lion home dir to 2TB hard disk using Preferences settings.
- Put a small user data directory on SSD to store things I want fast access to (maybe my iTunes library, and certainly a temporary Aperture library for initial storage of new projects that I work on [after initial processing on the SSD library, these projects will be exported and then imported into main Aperture library on 2TB hard drive).
- Also need to copy over user data and copy over (or re-install) applications from old iMAC: never did that before, so I don't know if Apple has any good tools for that or not...can anyone advise?
Well, thats all I can think of for now, any comments??
Thanks,
Colin.