Two weeks with the iMac Duo

Posted in apple, geekery, virtualization on February 20th, 2006 by ballew

It’s been two weeks since I bought the iMac with the Intel Duo processor, so I thought I’d share my opinions on how everything is working as a day to day workstation.

The setup: 20″ iMac Core Duo, 512MB Ram, OSX 10.4.5, attached VP201b LCD to DVI-out, standard Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse

First of all, Rosetta, Apple’s G3 processor emulator, works quite well. So far I’ve used Office, VLC, Xjournal, and MenuMeters in their old G3 binary formats and they work well. I had to ditch NeoOffice, since the installer would refuse to run, and DarwinPorts and Fink both haven’t ported to the Intel CPU yet. I had to upgrade MissingSync to the Universal binary format for it to work right, but alas that is only a beta.

On the average, I have iTunes, Safari, X11, ThunderBird, and Xjournal all running at the same time. With only 512MB of memory, the machine tends to come to a crawl when switching applications. Checking out the VM usage shows that 500MB of swap is in use, and after about a week of normal use, the swap climbs to 1.5GB. The CPU is almost always idle, so the main culprit here is memory use.

On the stability front, Rosetta apps tend to be a little on the slow side and crash at startup randomly. VLC and Xjournal tend to crash at startup, but once they are up and going they are stable. Office seems a little slow at times, but Office has always seemed slow to me. I can’t wait for NeoOffice, even being java based, to make it’s return to the Mac with it’s new platform, since it feels snappier than Office.

A new feature of the iMac is the ability to attach an external monitor and do an “extended” desktop, as opposed to the mirrored display you could do on the iMac G5. This has proved to be very useful, since now I can drag apps from the iMac screen to one of my Viewsonic VP201b LCD displays. Now I only wish expose would be more sensible about multi-display systems: having to scurry my cursor around two screens to get to an app can quickly become tedious.

I just ordered two 1GB sticks of Kingston memory, which were $274.09 after tax and shipping. Hopefully this will take care of what is basically my only complaint with this setup, a lack of available RAM! Now if only the iMacs could take more than 2GB of RAM…

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