Which Mac should I purchase

[Anonymous]

I am an intern architect and I need to learn the Archicad program 8.1.2. I will need to buy a new Mac to run the program and am considering the new 20"
iMac G4. Specs are as follows 1.25 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512MB of PC2700(333Mhz.) DDR SDRAM, 80GB hard disk drive, 4XSuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce
FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 56K modem, 10/100BT Ethernet, Firewire and USB connectivity and AirPort Extreme ready. Is this going to be
a good machine for Archicad? Should I consider a G4 PowerMac and Cinema display? Will the iMac need to be upgraded in the near future, and can that be
done easily? Any suggestions would be helpfull.

[James B]

Matthew wrote:
Five crashes is not normal. I would be surprised if we have five crashes in a month through the whole office. It's probably a lot less than that - I can't remember the last time I had a serious crash - in fact, we may not have had a single crash since upgrading to Panther a few months ago.

What you describe sounds like a kernel panic. It's possible that you have a system or software problem, but I suspect, once again, that it may be bad RAM. The crashes being more frequent in ArchiCAD is probably because it is likely the most demanding application you are running; especially when PlotMaker and BGArchiCAD are also working.

If you have access to TechTool Pro, try the hardware tests. Alternatively try running as many memory hungry programs as you can to see if you can crash the machine (Photoshop with a large file and whole bunch of complex filter operations could do the trick all by itself).

I told another mac friend of mine and he said it could be a RAM thing. Sounds like that could be it.

thanks for the info Matthew