The Apple iMac G5: Welcome to the future...today: Reviewed by Oliver Kochanski-Coad.

I got this for an amazing price from a friend, and it's the best thing I have got in a very long time! Read on to find out why.

I consider myself one of the luckiest people around at the moment, and you are about to hear why. A while ago my friend bought this computer. He invited me round to check it out and boy was I jealous! It was one of the nicest computers I had ever seen! He had it in his living room, right opposite the door so that every time I walked in, I became more jealous. I left a while later feeling grumpy and jealous, and obviously wanting one. I got home and went straight onto the Internet to see if I could fine a really cheap one anywhere, and of course I didn't. I repeated this procedure for a couple of days with no luck. However, a couple of days later (5 days ago), I received a phone call from my friend. He was swearing and moaning about the iMac like you wouldn't believe! He was going on saying that he didn't like it, and how he loved Microsoft and his Windows computer. He offered it to me for £350! Such an amazing price for a piece of wonderful equipment! So now I am the proud owner of this wonder machine! At the moment I am just using this for storing my music and pictures on, but it will be put to better use!

I have it in my bedroom, alongside the computer that I use for the internet and games (the one I'm using at the moment). It takes up no room at all! It is definitely the main piece of equipment in my house at the moment.

It is as light as a feather! For the first day I had it downstairs, and when I moved it upstairs it is only the weight of my TFT monitor (and that's a slim one at that). The 17" screen provides the same screen area as a standard 19" CRT monitor. The brightness, contrast, sharpness is all much better than normal monitors. Behind the display, is the main computer (not that you would believe it). There you will find everything: the CPU, logic board, HDD, Optical Drive, Power supply, microphone and speakers! It almost seems like these don't even exist. The new iMac G5 includes power supply, stereo speakers, and a slot loading Combo drive enclosed within the widescreen flat-panel display.

The iMac sits on a pedestal that lets it tilt forward and back. The screen does not rotate; you have to rotate the base. The computer will tilt about 5 degrees past vertical when tilted forward, and about 30 degrees from vertical when tilted back. The SuperDrive drive is on the right side of the computer and it's a slot-loaded design: You push the CD into the slot, and when it's almost completely in, the computer sucks it in the rest of the way.

The computer is capable of organizing all your music and photos, composing music, and editing movies with the built-in iLife application suite. There are no wires needed for getting online. So no more irritating wires leading all the way to your phone jack. All you need is an Air Port Extreme Card, and hook an Air Port Express DSL connection or cable modem and you are good to go! You can now surf the internet wirelessly, print all your documents wirelessly or even listen to music in another room. The resolution of the 17" screen is 1440x900 pixels, or the 20" display resolution is 1680x1050. This makes both displays great for imaging, videos and gaming. The processor is a 1.6 GHz G5 processor, 533 MHz front side bus, 256Mb DDR SD Ram running at 400 MHz, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64Mb graphics memory. With all of these you will be able to play loads of games with no trouble at all.

There are all the right ports in the computer so that you can connect all your different devices to it for all your needs. There is: A headphone jack that's also a mini optical plug, lots of USB 2.0 ports, Firewire 400 connectors for camcorders, cameras, game pads etc. There is also an Ethernet for wired networking as well as a modem for dial up Internet.

I have heard that the 1.6 GHz is not really noticeably slower than the 1.8 GHz so there isn't really any point in splashing out for the 1.8 'faster' model, as it isn't really that faster. I have the 1.8 GHz model but if I bought it from a shop I would of got the 1.6 GHz model.

The 256Mb RAM isn't really enough so I would suggest buying some more. You can buy it from the Apple shop, although you can get it for about half the price from a PC component store. The hard drive is fantastic with a whopping 160 GB.

The Operating System…
This is way ahead of Windows in my book, so I think that it may have been too advance for my friend for him to really get to grips with. With the Apple OS though, you can use the Apple operating system, and Windows software using Virtual PC. Don't tell my friend though or he might want it back. Ssshh.

There are lots of advantages that this has over the Windows operating system. This is a lot more stable so you won’t have to worry about having lots of programs or windows open as it doesn't crash like Windows does. There are probably less than half the problems that Windows has, so I think that Microsoft really need to look at this to get some ideas for their next Operating System, and systems in general.

For gamers this may not be the option for you as it seems to make a lot of noise when I play games, and it seems to get hot quite quickly. It hasn't caused any problems to the system, but the noise can be worrying, not to mention annoying. The gaming is the only downside to the system (if you could really call it that). You can pretty much fit your whole life on this. Well maybe not your life but definitely all your music, photos, email software everything you could dream of (unless you are one of them people that dream of fairies, and magic time machines that do everything for you, as unfortunately a if can’t quite manage that).