Computer Solution

Whether you’re a PC or Mac user, the humongous 24-inch iMac that Apple unwrapped on Wednesday drives home a point: Speed is good, but spread is better. For the past year, I’ve been working at two offices. Office A has a fairly new 17-inch Mac I bought so I could crank out more freelance work without having to turn off iTunes. But lately, I find myself making the longer trek to Office B to use an older, slower machine. Why? Because a generous Office B colleague updated the slowpoke with a 23-inch monitor.

Speed freaks are stoked that Intel has finally replaced its aging Pentium processors with a speedier design called Core 2. Apple went for broke and stuffed the new iMac with a dual-core Intel processor and a 24-inch monitor. But it’ll cost me $2,000-plus to buy my dream machine. If you’re feeling stymied by your computer, buy the monitor now and wait until Windows Vista comes out to upgrade the rest of your PC. You’ll get more Core 2 for your money by then, and you’ll already have a panoramic screen to let Vista live up to its name.

Don’t be fooled by all those Intel commercials: A faster CPU isn’t always the best upgrade. Dell hawks its Core 2 Duo PCs as the “ultimate multimedia and gaming experience.” What bigger multimedia buzz is there than a giant screen? I’m not a gamer, but I spend a lot of time with Word, Excel, Firefox, and iTunes. I watch a lot of YouTube by day and often slide a DVD into my desktop machine at night. I’m fascinated by Google Maps and Google Earth. For these applications, a faster processor doesn’t really help. But you know what’s better than a million pixels of Google Earth? Two million pixels of Google Earth.