Thanks for the feedback. We're still waiting to see what our next machine will be.

The cheapest option for you here would be to drop a DVD burner in an external firewire box.

Except for DVDs flying out of the drive, I've no complaints with my iMac G5. I got a refurbished one from Apple.

I did experience a bit of that terrifying fan business a while back, but it was cleared up by running disk utility. And I do a lot of big photoshop projects while running just about everything else simultaneously.

My main complaint is aesthetic/hygenic - my white keyboard gets disgusting very quickly. Ew.

There has been some discussion of the iMac G5 fan issue on MacOSXhints.com so you should check it out. They may have a fix. I personally have never had a fan issue with my 17" iMac G5 2.0 GHz machine...

My slot loading drive though can be touchy about disks... if they're homemade disks with an applique label, it has a tendency to choke on them.

I have a referb 20" G5 (w/o iSight) been running with it since Jan.
I've seen that fan problem... Only happened once tho'

Have seen flaky behavior from the built in SuperDrive. I don't use it much since my external DVD burner is faster and quieter.
It doesn't like some of the blank discs I have in stock. I don't expect I'll use it much until I buy some DVD DL discs.

Have seen some weird video noise... Don't know what it is or what causes it. It makes some of the pixels in my desktop image flicker
like certain colors in the image get a shot of noise in them. Really weird....

I have been using the machine for music, and have not had a problem with the fans, but then I have not really pushed the CPU very hard when mixing audio. Usually when I am trying to finesse a mix I use headphones anyway, so I am not expecting any trouble in this area. If and when I do any live mic work I may have issues with the fans, but I can think of a number of ways to avoid the hassles.

I did notice that when the Energy Saver setting is set to Automatic for Processor Speed the fans have an annoying tendency to spool
up and down more often which I find a bit distracting. Setting it on "Highest" seems to reduce this. The fans seem to ""hunt" more gradually, though the average noise level IS a bit higher.

Overall my biggest gripe is that the coating on the LCD panel is almost impossible to clean without leaving streaks. It picks up smudges so readily that I am becoming paranoid about getting my hands anywhere near the screen for fear of touching it accidently...

Does anyone else notice that sometimes the CPU will wake up a minute or two after putting it to sleep. It goes to sleep again after about 20 seconds, and then it seems to wake up periodically... It does seem to be intermittent. I have yet to discover what is causing it, though it may be related to which applications are running.... Mail? Safari? I just don't know. If I kill all the apps before sleep it does not seem to happen, but I cannot be sure.

Jeremy: I'm inclined to believe you have a lemon.... I've seen it happen before, and it sucks, but after repairing Mac CPUs for years, and keeping an eclectic stable of my own machines, over the years, I rarely see machines as cantankerous as yours seems to be...

=B-)

I'd gotten a smalldog 20" with applecare the first machine the firewire port could not read my Lexar Firewire card reader but was able to read my firewire hard drives. On the 15th day of return policy, I sent it back to smalldog for another one, its been working fine eversince.

I had heat problems from my 800mhz ibook which died as a result of heat related issues on its logic board. It was fixed once for this problem.
My charge card has additional warranty whihc covered the repairs, check your charge card extended warranty if u paid that method.

Becuase of that I have a external fan at the bottom of my 20" Imac, it a bit noisey but it is a good insurance against any failure.