When anyone thinks about the first iMacs, the words cool and colorful automatically come to mind. For those who were die-hard Mac fans at the time, many think of the fact that it was the iMac that saved Apple from extinction.

As years went by, it became known as the Mac plagued with problems. In the earliest iMacs, the tray-loaders - iMacs with a tray-loading CD-ROM drive - the GLOD (Green Light of Death) is all too common. The slot-loaders - iMacs with a slot-loading CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or CD-RW drive - have similar problems. The PAV (Power/Analog/Video) boards are known to be a common failure in G3 iMacs. Many iMacs see an early death because of this.

But that's not the only thing the iMacs suffer from, as I recently found out.....

I recently took apart my indigo iMac to clean out the dust inside.... Imagine my surprise when I took off the front faceplate to see that the white plastic underneath (covering the CRT) had major cracks in several different places. I've never abused or dropped my iMac. I've always been very careful with it, so I was very angry at this sight. The cracking is so bad that half of it could fall off.

I'm no Apple lover. Sure, I dig the design coup that is the iPod Touch, the lovely software interface of the Apple operating system, the content of the iTunes service. And I truly believe Steve Jobs is a living, breathing American genius. But Apple's hardware has always been frustratingly limited, particularly for small businesses.

But change is brewing at One Infinite Loop. Get ready for it, planet small biz: 2008 may be the year we start taking Macs seriously as business technology tools....

It has been almost four years since the last revision of Microsoft Office for the Mac, and Macintosh users can be forgiven for getting a little impatient. We heard all the buzz about the radical interface makeover for Office 2007 for Windows, and we wondered what user-interface goodies might be waiting for us.

While we waited, alternatives presented themselves. Apple Inc.'s Pages, part of the company's iWork '08 suite that arrived last fall, challenges the standard conception of word processing by blending in a generous helping of page layout. And open-source suites such as NeoOffice have duplicated and gone beyond what Microsoft Office has to offer.

After all that, what would the granddaddy of office suites have in store?

While the so-called "Google Generation" grew up with the Internet, having a sizable chunk of the world's information at their fingertips has failed to make them better thinkers, according to a university study.

Young people born after 1993 are certainly familiar with computers and the Web and use both with ease, but a study conducted by the University College London found that they lacked the critical and analytical skills necessary to assess the information they found mostly through search engines......information literacy has not improved with the widening access to technology. Instead, the speed of Web searching means little time is spent evaluating information for relevance, accuracy, or authority.

Young people also have difficulty in developing an effective search strategy. As a result, they have a strong preference for using natural language in searching, rather than analyzing which keywords might be more effective....

Finally, everyone, not just young people, prefers easily digestible chunks of information, rather than the full text. "Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all," the study said. "The popularity of abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down."

Inkjet printers are probably the most ubiquitous computer peripherals on the market. They've become commodity items, selling at prices that are so low that often the ink they use costs as much -- if not more -- than you what paid for the printer. Yet despite the proliferation of hundreds of models, there are perhaps no more than seven actual printer manufacturers: Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Kodak, Lexmark, and Ricoh.....

Up through about the $70 range, these printers beg the question whether to buy at the low-end and toss everything away when the cartridges run out, or go for the long (and more costly) haul, bite the bullet, and keep shelling out dollars on the rainbow-colored gold that ink has become.

There are some stories that get me more riled up then others. The recent news that Time Warner is now, all of a sudden, testing usage-based pricing for its residential broadband customers is once such piece of tech news.

My issue isn't with what Time Warner is trying to do. Rather, my issue is with the perception that the Internet is free - that is, that heavy usage is without cost.

The Internet is not free, and for the most part, it never has been.

The Time Warner story is essentially that they will now have plans tailored to fit the bandwidth usage requirements of users.

An online petition conducted by InfoWorld has managed to collect over 30,000 signatures asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP available, the magazine has revealed today. Called just Save XP, the petition argues that Microsoft's already extended June 30th cutoff point for sales of the 2001 operating system is still too short and that it should continue to sell "indefinitely," according to the organizers. The publication points to a lack of clear benefits to upgrading to its Windows Vista successor as well as problems with the new OS, such as slower performance in Microsoft Office tests as well as the expense of upgrading established business networks to the updated software.....

Nuance Communications, makers of the reputable Dragon NaturallySpeaking, has signed a licensing agreement with MacSpeech which allows the latter to integrate the Windows application's advanced speech recognition capabilities into their new product, Dictate. MacSpeech has decided to halt development of their other speech recognition product, iListen, and customers of the company who had bought iListen in the past are being offered substantial discounts on the retail price ($199) of MacSpeech Dictate.....

It has only been a day, or so, since Office for Mac 2008, and its communications and organization suite, Entourage, appeared in my mailbox. I am still playing with it, and learning the subtle quirks of the system. So, at this early stage, how does Entourage compare to Apple Mail, the mail client that ships with OS X?

I don't care whether or not you are thinking of using Vista, OS X or Linux. As a personal rule, I rarely upgrade until any release has been out for at least 6 months. Why is this? Flash back to the two issues (not patched, I believe) with OS X Leopard, the vast issues with Vista (mostly patched, again) and of course, distributions like Ubuntu that almost always have a laundry list of bugs until the next LTS (Long-Term Support) release comes out.

With this in mind, allow me to pass on some tips that have kept my household OS frustration-free for years....

I'm a long time heavy user of Adobe's Photoshop, but I tried out the $89 Photoshop Elements 6 just to see the difference between Elements and the full on version of Photoshop.

Is Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac just a stripped down version of Photoshop, or does it offer most of Photoshop's capability at a huge discount?

Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac users won't ship until sometime in March. From what we've been able to see of Elements, it will be worth the wait. If you have not upgraded to the full version of Photoshop and you're not a power user on steroids, Elements is a bargain at $89, even more so with the upgrade price of $69. ...The full version retail price of Photoshop CS3 is about $600.

I was a bit hesitant about writing this article but the information (and results) are just too juicy not to give away. Half way through penning this I also noticed that Adam Pash at lifehacker did a similar story so I guess it's acceptable to write about this sort of thing - and it should be. In case you haven't guessed yet I'm going to detail for you my adventure building a Hackintosh box running Leopard that rivals the speed of a similarly configured Mac Pro.

But for less than 1/3rd the cost!

You might want to grab a coffee as this tutorial is quite large. It was also designed with both the novice and newbie in mind, and therefore is full of plenty of screenshots to help you along.

Disclaimer: Please note that I am not interested at all in cries of software piracy or license misuse involved with using a patched Leopard DVD to run OS X on a PC. I have bought more than my share of Jaguar, Tiger and now Leopard software to really have much of a problem with it. If I am making you queasy already then you might want to read Apple's OS X SLA and go back to watching Cosby Show re-runs with your sister.

So was the Macworld Expo a smashing success, an abject failure, or something in between? Well, on The Tech Night Owl LIVE this week, we explored the possibilities, with a trio of guests on hand to cover the subject.

Back in the old days (the 1980s), I’d go to the local video store on a Friday and take home two or three VHS videos for the weekend. I had to return them on Monday, for otherwise I’d pay an extra dollar or two per day, each. in late charges. All right, if I called the owners and pleaded with them as to how I had to work late that day, they might give me a break. You cannot, of course, do that with a large chain store.

In theory, respectable newspapers devote a small amount of space to correct errors. When it’s an online news outlet, posts can be easily modified, and, when appropriate, the nature of the correction would be highlighted or explained in an addendum to the post.Unfortunately, there are far too many members of the press these days who, out of laziness, a blatant disregard for facts or for reasons unknown, choose to repeat the same falsehoods over and over again. You can correct them day and night, and it will make no difference.

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