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When I purchased my new Apple 24″ iMac, I spent quite a bit of time asking all sorts of questions.  I don’t know about you, but I get really annoyed when I spend time asking all the right questions, and get wrong answers.  I mean, why do stores bother hiring people to sell stuff when these folks don’t know their ass from their elbow when it comes to the stuff they’re selling?

In the case of this Apple iMac, I asked about extending the RAM from 1GB to 2GB.  Well, the fellow I talked with said it’s quite complicated opening up the box and changing the RAM, but I figured I could probably handle it, given that they wanted $75 to plug in the RAM.  So he happily sold me a couple of 1GB DIMM memory modules to install after I got the computer apart.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t give me any advice about doing this install — probably because they’re told not to do that.  Later on, I think I figured out why…

When I got home, I went about setting up my new Apple iMac 24″ computer.  Wow, what a BEAUTY this is!

Amazingly, when you turn it on, it just goes through a rather short setup process, reboots, and there you are.  It’s ready to run.  Very different from a typical Windows setup that takes the better part of an hour.

So I got the machine working and decided to look through the tiny bit of documentation that it comes with.  That’s not really a complaint; it doesn’t need much.  In fact, most of it is disclosures required by the various electrical codes in the countries where the hardware is sold for use.

I noticed this page that talked about replacing the memory.  Hmmm… there are two screws on the bottom that hold this screen in place.  You remove them, pull off the screen, and there’s the memory.  Simple.

I grabbed my screwdriver and opened ‘er up.  And there they are.  Two memory modules.  Room for two, and both slots are filled.

Errr… the guy at the store said there’s room for three.

He also said they’re regular desktop DIMMs.  Nope, these are SODIMMs, like what’s used in laptops.  Rather than being about 8″ long, they’re 2.5″ long.  Yikes!  These won’t even FIT!

So I took them back and got a refund.  OK, there’s an extra $250 to play with!

I got on eBay and found someone selling new 1GB SODIMMs for iMac computers and ordered a pair.  They showed up a few days later, and I set about installing them.

ASIDE: I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop that came with 512MB of RAM in it — 2 x 256MB memory modules.  Since I was messing with RAM upgrades, I decided to upgrade it to 1GB.  So at the same time I ordered the 2 x 1GB SODIMMs for the iMac, I also ordered 2 x 512MB SODIMMs for my Inspiron.  I paid about $110 including shipping for the two 512MB SODIMMs.  (I forget what I paid for the bigger ones, but it was much more.)

I ordered both sets of memory on Tuesday, and then posted an auction on eBay for the 2 x 512MB SODIMMs I was removing from the iMac.  I made it a short 3-day auction, and somebody ended up getting them for the screaming deal price of $65. I pulled them out of the iMac, packaged them up, and shipped them out right away.

The next day, the 1GB SODIMMs arrived, and I installed them into the iMac and fired it up.  Viola!  It came right up, and it now has 2GB of RAM in it’s belly!

Then these two 512MB SODIMMs arrived for my laptop.  I opened them up, and much to my chagrin, they were the EXACT SAME ITEMS THAT I HAD JUST SOLD FROM  MY iMac!  Yup, sold for $65, bought for $110.  Same brand, same part#, almost the exact same manufacturing lot.

It simply never dawned on me that my Dell laptop would take the exact same memory chips as the iMac. 

There’s an interesting moral to this story, that again reflects on the guys at the store: as far as the hardware goes, an iMac is not much more than a laptop computer with a large screen and separate keyboard.  I think it has a regular sized 3.5″ hard drive in it, but the memory is certainly for a laptop.

There’s a second thing that the guy at the store told me that may have been wrong.  He said that Parallels will ONLY accept Windows XP SP2 as a base Windows operating system, which is why I purcahsed a copy along with the computer.  I emailed the folks at Parallels, and they said that’s incorrect, and that you should be able to install any version of Windows into it, including older versions plus upgrades. 

But I found some stuff searching on the web indicating that may not be accurate either.  Seems you can install OEM versions of Windows under Parallels, but you have to jump through a bunch of hoops.  And people had really bad luck installing older versions plus upgrades.  So while it may be possible in theory, it didn’t look very convenient.  I decided to keep my copy of Windows XP SP2 Home Edition and install it into Parallels.

When I installed it, it took the usual 45 minutes or so.  Then I rebooted and it came up like any other newly installed copy of Windows.  It runs really fast, also like any newly installed copy of Windows.  I’m sure it’ll start to slow way down as I get stuff installed into it, just like any other copy of Windows.

I’ve had my iMac for a month now, and thus far all I’ve done is use it for reading email, surfing some web sites, and watching a couple of videos.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll start migrating my existing system software into it.  But first, I need to do some backing-up.  And that’s the next installment.

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