iMac for repair shop. used or new

[sswats]

I have a little pc repair shop and need to expand to Macs. so need to have a mac in the shop for stuff like data recovery and so i can learn a bit more on it at the same time.
Also mac people seem to get excited when they see a mac in the shop and it gives them that little bit of trust in us (haha fools)

I'm a mac n00b. So all i know is that it needs firewire for the data recovery.
Are all OSX's compatible (backwards and forwards) in terms of extracting data, and using that data recovery link over firewire?

I'm looking at ebay and G5's are around 500 which seems a lot. Refurbished apple shop 20" with C2D at 670 seem a better deal.
New 22" is for 950 I believe.

or any other recommendations on what to get and best place to get it from. was also considering macbook pros.

 

[mosfet]

Target Disk Mode (which I think is what you mean) simply turns the machine into an external drive; any computer that can read HFS (mac) hard drives will be able to recover data.

As well as pretty much all Mac from the last decade that includes Windows PCs with firewire and Macdrive installed, and Linux/BSD machines with HFS read drivers.

The 20" iMac you specced it probably the best deal. G5s won't be getting any major software updates from now on, although the space for PCIe cards might be valuable for you to test graphics and IO cards (unlikely if it's mostly home consumer kit).

Grab yourself a copy of Techtool and Disk Warrior for general tasks and get familiar with the operating system. There are a number of different key combinations you can use at startup to change the behaviour of the machine (like changing BIOS/Windows start options on a PC) and a number of config files in the system directory.

You might also want a virus scanner on there too, not for the machine itself but to prevent viruses that people might have on their own equipment being spread to any Windows machines.

 

[Feek]

Don't touch a non-intel Mac, they may be cheaper but that's because they're now very outdated and can't run the latest OS, Snow Leopard.

 

[sswats]

yes target disc mode. very useful. Didn't know you can use it to link to a PC.
But i tried and didn't particularly like macdrive.

Ok so the 20" mac is looking good.

I plan on keeping the Mac setup separate from the PC's. Although i guess an antivirus couldn't hurt.

thanks for the help.

 

[mosfet]

yes target disc mode. very useful. Didn't know you can use it to link to a PC.
But i tried and didn't particularly like macdrive.

Ok so the 20" mac is looking good.

I plan on keeping the Mac setup separate from the PC's. Although i guess an antivirus couldn't hurt.

thanks for the help.

Let us know how it goes, and if you have any problems you can't solve just drop a post in this forum.