Buy advice/help: pc toMac guidance...

[W. Gallagher]

After too many years of frustration w/MS, I now have $'s to buy 1.8 G5.
1'st Q. "Any reason to wait?" (don't want to as worried about vhs home movies life)
2nd Q. Looking to convert still digital pic's & scans to DVD. as well as to convert VHS to DVD. Do I need more than the 1.8 for this process? And, more than 512 Ram?
Price for system came to $2,329 on Apple site w/ATI 9600, prot. plan, iSight etc. Should I look for Ram from other vendor (cheaper?)?
3rd Q. Does anybody have recommendation for iSight. My son & family are moving to Japan and would like to know if iSight works internationally.
I did look at the board(s) but couldn't find new buyer advice; so if this is "old news", please let me know where I missed that info/Forum.
Thanks for any help

[Brad]

Welcome to AppleNova! :) Congrats on deciding to purchase your first Mac. Hopefully we'll be able to answer all of your questions here. Please feel free to post any other thoughts or questions you may have.

1'st Q. "Any reason to wait?" (don't want to as worried about vhs home movies life)The G5 lineup was just recently updated; so, I see little reason to wait right now.

2nd Q. Looking to convert still digital pic's & scans to DVD. as well as to convert VHS to DVD. Do I need more than the 1.8 for this process? And, more than 512 Ram?Even the old G4s were sufficient for DVD work. Of course, DVD encoding is a very CPU-intensive task and it'll always pay off to have a faster machine doing that grunt work. Still, I think the 1.8 should do you nicely.

As for the RAM, 512 MB is what most folks around here would consider a comfortable minimum. Multimedia work especially can eat up lots of RAM if you're working with either large files or multiple files at the same time. Once the system uses all that memory, it'll start to bog down and thrash the hard drive for virtual memory. Granted, Mac OS X does an excellent job at dynamically dealing out memory as needed, but any system that hits virtual memory is going to suffer.

The general consensus on buying RAM these days is to buy as much as you can possibly afford! You'll be kicking yourself later if you don't. ;)

Should I look for Ram from other vendor (cheaper?)?Yup, most people get the minimum possible from Apple and buy the rest from third parties like Crucial.com. Apple has a locked price with RAM manufacturers and thus often appears to be charging way more than the current market value.

3rd Q. Does anybody have recommendation for iSight. My son & family are moving to Japan and would like to know if iSight works internationally.The iSight should work anywhere. It simply has one cable (FireWire) that connects to your Mac. The FireWire cable provides power; so, you don't have to worry about anything like an outlet adapter.

When Steve Jobs first demonstrated the iSight, for example, he opened up a chat with another guy in France. It connected quickly and streamed beautifully just s if he was in the next room.

I hope this helps!