I'm the guy watching these commercials with people who switched to a mac from a PC and all their troubles are long gone. For me, my PC works just great under Windows 2000 and it's my new iMac that gives me fits. Who can I contact for support? No one. Apple is so confident (???) that they only offer 3 months of support, then it's "Screw you." Anyway, my problem. My iMac, first of all, HATES music CDs. It has the most finicky CD player I've EVER seen. Freshly burned CDs on another machine (low burn speed, plays fine on stereo, etc) often cause it to pause, freeze. Good luck getting the CD out any time soon. A press of "eject" results in spinning up and down for a variable amount of time... then you'll get it eventually. Of course, you may have to force-quit iTunes 2.0. A CD that may have a minor scratch that doesn't affect ANY OTHER CD player will cause the Mac to run around in circles forever. I have a 15 year old protable CD player that plays CDs 1000 times more consistantly than the iMac. WHY IS THIS? This is not new technology, can't Apple get this right? Did I just get a lemon??? I also have consistant freeze problems coming out of sleep, usually when an application is running (iTunes, Mail, IE). That "Pinwheel of Death" spins and spins. I may be able to force-quit, but more times than not I just have to power off manually and restart. I know this sounds like a big rant, but I REALLY want to like this machine and it's REALLY driving me crazy! Am I alone? Does anyone else have these problems? Thanks, Chris Carrier

1) Why are you still using iTunes 2? 2) Why are you still using IE? 3) Have you kept your firmware up to date? 4) When's the last time you ran your Software Update control panel? p

Apple released a firmware updater that's supposed to address the issues you're having with CDs. If you haven't installed it yet you should. You also mention iTunes 2.0. You should download and install version 3.0.1. It also sounds like you're using Mac OS X version 10.1. You should upgrade to 10.2.1 for a ton of fixes.

I thought such updates were automatic? (the computer seems to update itself) Are they free? Oh, and I do have iTunes 3.01 already. My mistake in the original message.

Me again. Is this firmware updater going to cost me? Is it the $129 update that I see? Please say no. If not, is there a link?

Everything but 10.2 on my list is free. Run Software Update. p