iMac Core Duo quirks

No, this isn't a pic of our rig of the day. It's my rig. I've had my iMac Core Duo for a few weeks now, so I thought I'd provide some more impressions for those of you still on the PowerPC side of the processor divide. Monitor spanning works nicely, especially with a nice screen like the 24-inch Dell (featuring the same a similar LCD as Apple's 23-inch Cinema display, but with an extra inch of visibility, better resolutioncontrast, and a slew of extra USB ports and a built in memory card reader). I'm still only running the default 512MBs of RAM, but I only really feel the lack of RAM when I launch one of the media-heavy iLife apps (especially iPhoto), when I have a lot of apps open, or when I run apps in Rosetta. For the most part, the new iMac is still blazingly fast.

I have noticed a few oddities with Rosetta. I cannot always drag documents to Word in the Dock or pictures to Photoshop in the Dock to launch the program and open the document / picture, as I can with native apps. I can launch the program this way, but it will often not open the file after launch. If the app is already running, then this sporadic inability to open files doesn't seem to occur. Also, Rosetta apps have crashed on me from time to time. Native apps run fine.

Another issue: where is X11? I cannot find it installed on the machine and cannot seem to find an installer that works online. I downloaded the Intel-savvy ports of OOo and the Gimp, but neither will run since there doesn't appear to be any installation of X11 on the iMac. If somebody knows where I can find X11 let me know. UPDATE: Found an "Install Optional Installs" app on the disk that came with the iMac and X11 would appear to be the only of the apps listed that wasn't installed by default. Odd.

The processor is fast. I know I keep saying that, but yesterday I used the free Universal Binary version of iSquint to batch process about 10 movies into iPod format in just a few hours. Much faster than either my old G4 PowerBook or my old G5 PowerMac. Overall, I'm loving the new iMac, but I am noticing little spots of bugginess here and there, and I'm hoping that recent Core Duo problems in Windows land don't end up being issues with our Macs.
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