[jonthanlucas]

Give us a review of your experience and how you like your new system and the spec of your new machine. (Mine is on the way)

[unfaded]

Wow. This thing is zippy. And it surprised the hell out of me in games performance - nothing incredible, but some pretty god damn decent frame rates in some higher resolutions in higher details.

I'm pleasantly surprised

[neely]

Originally posted by jonthanlucas:
Give us a review of your experience and how you like your new system and the spec of your new machine. (Mine is on the way)

Been using my 1.25GHz eMac for a week now and I'm almost completely impressed: it's speedy (seti@home units that took 17.5 hours on my old 400MHz indigo iMac take about 6.5 hours on the eMac), the graphics card seems to be powerful enough to do the job - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 is smooth at 800x600 even with full-screen anti-aliasing turned on, and Quartz Extreme makes graphic-intensive Finder operations like Expos� and window minimising as smooth as you like.

The monitor on my machine is sharp and bright, though there is some slight bowing along the top of the picture and some faint curved "banding" on the left and right sides, presumably caused by poor shielding on the speakers. Nothing bad enough to warrant a return, though.

Downers: fan noise is slightly distracting but not evil, the computer makes a slightly alarming mechanical clang immediately after pressing the power-on button, the big clumsy door on the optical drive slams closed a little too hard when closing the tray, and who's bright idea was it to make a white keyboard that's going to show up every fingerprint and every single speck of dust and dirt, especially for a model that's meant to be used by kids?

For the money, though (providing the monitor doesn't do something squinky in the coming weeks/months/years), it's a great, if slightly ugly computer, and I'm glad I bought it.

[neely]

Originally posted by neely:
there is some slight bowing along the top of the picture

Further to that, some experimentation (i.e. I wiggled the computer around a bit) reveals that the bowing of the picture is a result of environmental issues, as has been mentioned in this Apple KB document which, though it sounds like a load of old bollocks, appears to hold some truth. Rotating the computer in one direction decreased the bowing of the picture, while rotating it in the opposite direction increased it. So, in summary, this doesn't appear to be a fault with the eMac, rather a fault with the Earth's magnetic pull. Or some dodgy wiring in my walls. One or the other.

Funny how it didn't do it with my old iMac, though...

[Joe's iMac G4]

Originally posted by neely:
Further to that, some experimentation (i.e. I wiggled the computer around a bit) reveals that the bowing of the picture is a result of environmental issues, as has been mentioned in this Apple KB document which, though it sounds like a load of old bollocks, appears to hold some truth. Rotating the computer in one direction decreased the bowing of the picture, while rotating it in the opposite direction increased it. So, in summary, this doesn't appear to be a fault with the eMac, rather a fault with the Earth's magnetic pull. Or some dodgy wiring in my walls. One or the other.

Funny how it didn't do it with my old iMac, though...

I had an RCA 38" HDTV (direct tube CRT), briefly, before it went bad. There was a control in the user menu to adjust for the magnetic pull. It is supposed to be worse on the East Coast.