He recommended looking at a PowerMac G5, which isn’t brand new but would provide plenty of power and retain the ability to upgrade in the future. I was a little dubious to begin with, but a quick look at eBay showed that a typical PowerMac G5 was actually cheaper than a comparatively priced iMac. Tempting.

In fact, it wasn’t long before I realised I was looking at something I knew I was destined to purchase. A PowerMac from June 2004, with a dual 2GHz G5 (PPC) processor, 2.5GB RAM, two 160GB hard disks, Mac OS 10.5 ‘Leopard’, and a few pre-installed programs. Not only was this pretty much exactly what I was looking for, but it was cheaper than I had expected to find it. I looked at the photos. I checked some other listings. I came back and looked at the specs again. I checked my e-mails. I came back again and made sure it was still there. No amount of procrastination was going to change the fact that it was exactly what I wanted, at a price I could afford.

So I went downstairs to make myself a cup of tea.

At that point my wife told me off for procrastinating and told me to go and buy the computer before someone else did. So I did. The only snag in the process is that PayPal only allows me to pay for items up to £500 on their basic account – to purchase anything more expensive than that I need to pay them for the privilege. Grrr. So I’ve contacted the seller and I’m going to see if I can pay by cheque or bank transfer or something. Either way I’ve committed to buy it, so it’s technically mine, even if money hasn’t changed hands yet.

So, yay! I have a new computer set to arrive within the next few days! I get bucketloads of memory, stacks of hard disk space, and the joys of Leopard. My next challenge will be selling my cute Mac Mini, and preferably getting rid of the dead G3 under my desk too. Any takers? I’m guessing there will be more people interested in a working computer than a dead one…

To be fair, the Mac Mini has been superb. It looks great, does the job very nicely, is blissfully quiet, and has a faster processor than the G3. And for a £260 Mac, it really was a bargain. Unfortunately, however, its power just doesn’t match up to my needs, and I’ve reached the point where I have to seriously consider budgeting for a more powerful alternative.

In truth, I am not the sort of user Apple targeted the Mac Mini at. I use my computer for significantly more than surfing the web and checking e-mails. On an average working day I will normally end up with at least a dozen programs all open at once, some of them big hefty ones like Photoshop; and my nice big 19″ monitor still isn’t big enough, and I make regular use of virtual desktops, switching between various screens for different types of work. All this is sometimes reasonably processor-intensive, and definitely requires plenty of RAM. And it’s on this count that my Mac Mini falls down.

The 1.42Ghz G4 processor isn’t exactly sluggish, and handles everything I throw at it. It’s the memory that lets it down. The 512MB of RAM is quickly used up, and beyond that it seems to spend all its time swapping memory in and out from the hard disk, which slows everything down considerably and doesn’t do the hard disk much good either. I did consider upgrading the memory in the Mac Mini, but it only has one slot and has an upper limit of 1GB, which I don’t think will be enough for very long.

So, the upshot of all this is that I’m looking at buying a new computer. By ‘new’, incidentally, I mean second-hand, but not old. After reading an interesting article on buying a Mac the other day I don’t think I’ll need a nuclear-powered fire-breathing Mac Pro, that’s perhaps a little too much power and far too many pennies. And a laptop just isn’t enough of a step up from my Mac Mini to be worth the expense, along with the fact that I would never need it to move from the desk. It seems the iMac is therefore the best option for me at the moment, with its reasonable price and mid-range performance. It also has a built-in screen, which means I can use my existing TFT monitor as an additional screen for some double-headed fun. I’ve found some machines on eBay with 4GB RAM and 2GHz processors, and that should certainly do me for a while.

The only problem with this approach is that it’s harder to replace bits when they go wrong. Then again, when do Macs go wrong? My old G3 only died because it was old, and by old I mean really old, and by really old I mean it originally had a 450MHz processor. Ouch.

So, a new iMac is on the cards for the near future. The biggest complication in all of this is that we’re also trying to save every penny at the moment for a deposit for a house, so that needs to be factored in as well. Before I buy myself a shiny new computer, I shall need to make sure I can guarantee I can sell my Mac Mini to a good home and get some return on it. Anyone interested?