I am posting this both here and in Mixed Bag as it is not a purely technical matter.
Our over 10 years old Dell Dimension PC is on its last legs (more like crawling on its knees and struggling to breathe...!) and we have decided to go for an entry level iMac as our needs are fairly modest: mainly work related email and light word processing, iTunes, web surfing/shopping and some light gaming.
This will be our first venture into Apple desk top computing, although my wife has and loves both iPad and iPhone while I love my ancient iPod nanos.
Apple are able to offer us a refurbished 2011 model with the 2.5 ghz processor and built in disk drive at a pretty good price (£819 as against £1099 for the current model with 2.7 ghz processor but disk drive only as an external extra).
This will have full warranty, and as the disk drive is something we are likely to use quite often, especially to upload music and burn music CDs, I like the sound of it.
we would be adding a neat wireless scanner/printer which would also allow printing from the iPad or iPhone, also a separate 1 terrabyte hard drive.
This model has a 500Gb hard drive and 4Gb ram which can be upgraded to 8Gb.
I am aware of some possible compatibility issues with windows based programmes, but suspect that these can be resolved.
I am hoping that some of you may have views one way or the other to help guide us.