Apple's iMac has many problems, yet you would want one
The new iMac boasts of the biggest screen in the entire cosmos of computers. Yet it doesn't pass for the perfect media device. Where does it fall short?
For starters, we would have loved to see at least the headphones socket and a couple of USB ports on the side for convenience now that the ones on the keyboard are gone.
The Mac OS X looks wonderful, but it's actually easy to lose the mouse cursor from time to time on such a high-definition screen. The iLife apps, especially Garage Band, are good fun, and using Photoshop and Illustrator was never more pleasurable. However, for Windows 7 users, the new iMac doesn't play nice without a few extra driver downloads.
Your iMac screen will simply go blank midway through the installation. We spent a fair amount of time diagnosing the fault, which turned out to be a missing video driver.
Driver Disorder
Further investigation revealed that we had to download the correct driver (100MB approx) fr0m Apple's website and unzip it to a USB pen drive, which has to be left plugged in during installation. Windows will search through all available devices and then install the driver, after which you'll be good to go.
After installation, you'll also need to install an update to the Windows Boot Camp utility (another 380MB) even though official instructions say nothing of the sort. Without the new version, you won't be able to use the Magic Mouse.
However, the update caused severe color banding on the screen as the color depth dropped from 32 bit to 16 bit. So we had to roll back the graphics driver.
This is quite a hassle considering Boot Camp has worked so smoothly on previous Apple machines. All we're unhappy about is the absence of instructions that might have prepared us for this ordeal. The new iMac is not ready yet for Windows 7, but if this is not what you're buying a Mac for, there's no need to worry.
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