I have way too many PCs in my house, but a couple of them have been elevated to “must have”. The notebook in the kitchen had become indispensable, like coffee in the morning.

My morning wake up routine became

  1. Drink coffee
  2. Check my e-mail
  3. Check out my social networks
  4. Do a little sysadmin on my servers
  5. Drink some more coffee

And all from my kitchen notebook. But the HP notebook was overheating and automatically shutting down on a routine basis. As a result Lily and I thought “why not replace it with a Mac book?”

Once we got to the Apple store we realized that the iMac was more bang for the buck, and the small kitchen notebook never moved from its place. We now have the 21.5 inch iMac cheerfully sitting on my kitchen island and I’m writing this up on it now.

We selected an iMac because the kids use them in school and more importantly, I just want the thing to work. It’s pretty straight forward and after I ran the software updater a few times I was up to date on all the patches.

It’s got a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. The mouse was easy to get used to (it’s a Magic Mouse after all) but the keyboard makes me do an occasional double-take. There are no insert or page down/up keys and while the chiclet keys are not small, the overall size of the keyboard is.

Adding my network printer to the iMac was a breeze. Once it found the printer on the network, all I had to do was confirm that I wanted to install it.

Overall I’m really pleased with it. Everyone likes the iMac and the display looks great. The only thing that I’ll need to do is find the equivalent versions of the software I use. I’m mostly a Notepad++, PuTTY, and Firefox user so I should be able to find Mac equivalents.