JT, how is your iMac doing after the software updates?

Mach2billy,
Thank you for asking. I was going to wait a little longer before providing an update and some closure to the initial issue.

Anyhow, I'm happy to say that so far everything is stable after the 10.5.2 combo update + graphics update. I've not used the iMovie application as much though, but was daily using Safari and iPhoto with absolutely no problem. I also set up and made one backup to an external drive using the Time Machine; it went very smoothly. The only thing that slightly changed for the worse is that it is taking a noticeably longer time for the machine to shut down, compared to before the update.

In a nutshell, my iMac with the OS X 10.5.2 is working very smoothly now and I am pleased with it. It is a good machine and system. [...although there are a few things that I am still stumbling on. E.g. I am still confused with the Control, Command, and Option keys not knowing which to use to get the normal option that I get on the PC with a right click of the mouse; seems to depend on situation.]

Of course, thank you to you and others for recommending the combo update..

I very rarely shut down the system....try just using "Sleep" instead. Turns off way faster and wakes up way faster too!

You should still do a full shutdown every once in a while though.

JT...I just bought a 2 button mouse for use on my Mac's. That fixed most of the problems for me.

His system would have come with a "Mighty Mouse" and that is a 2-button mouse. A really horrible 2-button mouse, but a 2-button mouse all the same ;)

I agree the Mighty Mouse is mighty bad.

FYI, with your iPhoto issue, sect the phot and then under the menu edit command (I think, but it's been a while) is a "revert to original" command. iPhoto keeps a copy of all originals even after you edit/change them and you can always go back.

Give it a whirl.

dufferdan,
Good suggestion. However, didn't work when I tried it because "revert to original" was grayed out. Thanks anyways!

With respect to the Mighty Mouse (MM), it has created some annoyances with a significant number of people. It is indeed a two-button mouse (actually 4) but the default is one. One has to change it into a left- and right-click mouse by selecting it in the System Preference; I found that out when reading the forum on ehMac.ca.

Interestingly, I just discovered that the problem with my fumbling around and confusion with the right-click is because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work when I want to get the context-driven drop-down menu with respect to a folder or other item. As harpoongill summarized it very well before, "90% of it is so smooth, fast and intuitive...but 10% of the Mac experience is a brick wall."

Guess what with the MM?? For a right-hander, TO PROPERLY DO A RIGHT CLICK on the MM you indeed have to LIFT UP THE INDEX FINGER that is on the left side of the mouse (so that it is not touching the surface) before pressing on the right side of the mouse!! Intuitive?? If you don't believe it, experiment with it and provide some feedback as confirmation...

I just can't stand the MM myself. It is just WAY too easy to inadvertently select the wrong button or even click a button totally by accident. I have a Microsoft mouse on my Mac. One with real buttons that have a nice obvious 'click' to them!

Well, let me just go on record to say that I love the Mighty Mouse. Best mouse I have ever used. Never have any problems right-clicking (never seen the right-clicking grayed out either) and never mistakenly hit a button when I don't want to. I absolutely love the 360 degree wheel and feel totally crippled when I have to use a traditional up-and-down-only wheel mouse. When I go into a new place to work (I am freelance and work on the systems provided) I always try to hunt down a MM. Just my 2 cents.

faston, the mention of grayed-out option in the few posts above was not with respect to the Mighty Mouse (MM) at all. It was about a possible method of retrieving a photo that simply got lost after it was renamed.

Do you mind confirming that to get a right-click you have to lift the finger on the left side of the MM so that it is not touching the surface? Thanks.

I have to chime in - the Mighty Mouse is the worst mouse I've ever used. When I switched to iMac from a PC, I really tried to give that mouse a chance, thinking it was just something else slightly different that I had to get used to. But right clicks were hit and miss until I figured out that I had to lift my index finger off of the left button in order for the right click to be recognized reliably. How stupid is that? Apple usually does a pretty good job of design, and I really like my iMac partly because of it's great design, but the MM = FAIL. Ironically, I'm using an MS mouse now.

I never leave my finger on the left button when right-clicking. I just tried it and, quite logically, when pressing both buttons at once nothing happens.

I switched over to a imac after 2 people I know who are power users made the switch. One of them raved about the the mac os. So I figured I'd try it as I could still run windows in boot camp. I've had it for maybe 8 months and I rarely use it as a mac unless I'm just surfing and forgot to hold down the alt button.

As others have stated it's not very intuitive to a pc user. My wife was excited to use it, she loved the look of it. She almost always uses it as a pc. My friend says we just have to give the mac os a chance and we'll get used to it, but it hasn't happened. My wife just can't be bothered to try to learn and adjust the the mac os when she can get her stuff done in ms office much quicker in windows.

In regards to the mighty mouse, I hate it. I went back to my razer sidewinder. Does anyone find the cursor a bit sluggish when it goes over pull down menus? I tried adjusting the settings but haven't had an luck fixing this.

I thought I'd have the best of both worlds with this imac. In retrospect I regret buying it. At the time my computer died and I wasn't in the mood to build an new one. Buying an imac and having it work straight out the box seemed appealing at the time. I'll eventually get around to building another pc eventually.

wingzero asked:
"Does anyone find the cursor a bit sluggish when it goes over pull down menus? I tried adjusting the settings but haven't had an luck fixing this."

My cursor appears to be quite smooth and responsive when it hovers over pull-down menus and the menus drop down very quickly. My settings are, counting from the left side, 5 units Tracking, 3 units Scroll, and 9 units Double-click. Not sure whether these are the settings that you are referring to when you make adjustments?

One question I have about the pea button is when I set it to 360 degree in the System Preference, does it mean that I should be able to move the cursor *around the desktop* in any direction by rolling the pea button, instead of moving the MM?

When I thought that I got everything running smoothly another problem appears to be cropping up now! [Solved the system or application lock-up/freezing with a combo update + graphics update; solved the confusion with the right-click button by finding out that one need to lift up the left finger away from the left-click surface before right-clicking.]

I followed JohnnyG's suggestion to put my 24" iMac with OS X (Version 10.5.2) to sleep rather than shut it down. The suggestion was put forward based on my remark that after the updates the shut down process was taking a noticeably longer time than before the updates. Putting it to sleep was supposedly better because it "Turns off way faster and wakes up way faster too!" I regret that I followed that suggestion now.

The problem is that I did that once only and after awakening I now have connection problem with my wireless Internet (Airport Extreme?). Sometimes I get a message saying that my computer is not connected, sometimes I have hiccups (downloads halt and then proceed or simply hang up, and I have to re-enter web address and hit return), and sometimes it is just going unusually slow. Basically, ever since I woke up the machine from one sleep session the wireless connection has been conspicuously and annoyingly flaky!! It is bewildering that this might be a possible reason, but when I looked up the Internet my problem might not be an isolated case. Eg.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6704808 and
http://forums.macworld.com/message/202321
Before this awakening my connection was rock solid, either with the iMac or with the two other PCs that I have. The two PCs still have very good connection now but not the iMac!

This is indeed very, very annoying. Does anyone else on this forum having a similar problem??? [I seem to be the only one have a problem with my iMac??? Am I the one going crazy???]

I don't know why you would have problems with sleep mode - I use a macbook and it goes to sleep everytime I close the lid. No connectivity issues. I actually found the mac mini with tiger to be more problematic in that area, but often these issues can be solved by turning off the wireless and then turning it back on.

Mighty mouse appears pretty bad from my limited Apple store experience - I use a bluetooth logitech 3 button scollwheel (v270 maybe?) on either the mac or the thinkpad depending on which I'm using.

One other good thing about the mac from my point of view is the lack of a registry and being able to bring all user apps and data from one source to another relatively painlessly. I started out using my daughter's mac mini, and eventually almost all my apps were run there instead of on my dual core XP media centre. My ipod touch wouldn't sync with XP, turns out that was common with certain HP machines. None of the 3 methods of sharing videos with the xbox 360 on the PC worked - connect360 for $20 on the mac mini did so just fine. Not as nice as the media center extender experience in the look and feel on the 360, but the extender couldn't use the new codecs, rendering divx a big pain with something like transcode 360. Windows media player won't share mp4s (even tho the 360 will play them). Zune software will share movies, but not podcasts. Ick. Even getting a DVD to play on the ipod touch required 3 separate pieces of hackware which turned into a 1 click solution with handbrake.

Anyway, my daughter wanted me to stop using her (tiger mini) so much so I got a macbook, during install it just sucked all my data, applications etc. straight over even though there was an OS upgrade. I had to get a new version of the Cisco VPN client that was Leopard compatible, and I was already connecting to the office. Built in X windows work great for my day to day Unix development environment, and the Unix (BSD) underpinnings in the Mac plus all the compilers and tools in the Apple developer connection (free) toolkit means that you're never at a loss for a tool for the job - I just wish I had more time to explore the depth and breadth of that suite. I find that both the shareware apps and fully paid ones tend to be 'better' not just different on the Mac, maybe its the tools, maybe its the kind of developers attracted to the Mac, but they just seem more complete and seamless.

I still think its not all roses - I set up hot corners for screen lockup, and that stops working after some period of time (no other method works then either, except closing the lid as that requires a password on wakeup). Sometimes apps crash, and sometimes it's hard to get the machine to shutdown cleanly without killing apps by hand and retrying. And I got some sort of corruption in an OS system file and my machine would no longer boot! But it would come up in target disk mode, and in safe mode, and the files in general looked fine. But I had been too cavalier about backups, waiting for a time capsule and the delaying on doing anything about it when it did come out. So I used target disk mode to first pull off my important data, then decided to upgrade the HD instead of doing a re-install with archive and restore. The old hard drive went into a $20 USB case, and after the fresh install to the new (and faster due to the larger drive size) HD, I just pulled all my user settings and data/apps in off the old HD using migration assistant. Good as new. But now I do have a time capsule, do have an external harddrive for other backup types (or you can use a time capsule drive for say a super duper or carbon copy cloner disk image as well).

I can't imagine the pain I would have gone through trying to do any of these user migrations from OS to OS and HD to HD using any flavour of Windows. But although some risks are mitigated by a single supplier (no odd HP cheapo Motherboard problems for instance), no system is perfect no matter how cool their ads may be. I still switch back to a thinkpad from time to time, and now that I've paid my dues at learning the mac (or unlearning the pc???) it is a little painful. My personal experience is just that things simply work better for the types of things I do on a day to day basis using the mac, but it is a bit of a paradigm change. Oh, did I mention that calendaring with Yahoo works better as well - no expensive windows software required to get the calendar info to push to my ipod touch or Bluetooth phone (isync and iCal handle all the heavy lifting).

The abililty to move apps from one machine to another just by copying the folder is a wonderful departure from Windows. I had read LONG ago that Microsoft was working on changing this so that the system registry was built up dynamically at boot up by loading registry files from application folders, but I have no idea what ever became of that concept.

It has been a few months now. After several updates my 24" iMac does not have any more difficulty wakening from sleep, although it does still take a few seconds before getting back the wireless Internet connection. [Before it would result in erratic reception but it is now pretty solid (Sep. '08).] Thus, I put it to sleep as a habit now rather than turn it off as JohnnyG originally suggested in this thread.

Not sure what you're remembering, but this is what I said:

I very rarely shut down the system....try just using "Sleep" instead. Turns off way faster and wakes up way faster too!

You should still do a full shutdown every once in a while though.