NB: I have a Rev A (Bondi Blue) iMac, running OS 8.5 and as much RAM as I could shovel inside it (128 MB). I have not expanded the VRAM (Video RAM) or installed the modem or CD updates.

Agfa Snapscan 1212u scanner - a colleague got one with his RevB iMac but has yet to take it out of the box. Get a move on, Volod! Any reports on the ease of installation and integration of this scanner welcome. I see from a US edition of Macworld that it now comes in transparent blue plastic - if only I'd waited!

I have an Epson Stylus Color 740 printer, bought from John Lewis in London. I have to say it installed OK, and I've had no trouble at all with it - exept in my hard disk crash I lost the driver and had to spend another 30 minutes downloading it from the Epson web site. I've used it in all USB ports including the keyboard, and it seems to hot plug ok. I have used it to print high resolution colour photos, however, and I've not used any of the software that came with its CD, such as Adobe PhotoDeluxe or Epson PhotoSheet, and the High Quality Images application says it won't work with USB. A neat feature of this printer is that it also has a parallel port and I have successfully used it connected to my old 486 PC running Windows3.1 at the same time as it was connected to my iMac via the USB port.
There are reported problems with certain drivers for this printer and OS 8.6 - see Apple TIL 58407 for more info.

A friend reports his Bondi Blue RevA iMac's keyboard has fallen apart. He says the rubber membrane is likely to break after prolonged use, causing the key to lose its springiness and causing the iMac to think it's permanently depressed (a state likely to be mirrored by the user). Remember, that in Apple's wisdom, the keyboard is just another USB peripheral, and yet in my experience it's NOT hot-pluggable. In fact sometimes when I leave it where it is, the iMac decides they're not on speaking terms.

I have installed the maximum amount of extra memory - I had problems if I tried to run more than one big application at a time, but small programs like BBEdit were happy to sit alongside one big application. Peter Jones reported that an extra 64 megs of memory has worked wonders and his machine is much less crash-prone now - I wouldn't say I have noticed a huge decrease in crashes, however.

My internal modem seems to work fine, usually at around 44000bps into Demon's 0845 number. The iMac is at the end of a long run of phone extensions. I've not installed the iMac modem update on the grounds that if it ain't broke...

USB ISDN/128k modems are now available for about £180 - has anyone used one with BT Home Highway and an iMac?

If you have a RevA or RevB iMac you are lucky enough to have a infra-red port. And you CAN use it to hot-sync a Palm III organiser - a friend has done it. You need to spend an age downloading loads of drivers and gubbins from 3com's website, but it works and it's dead cool. Saves buying a serial-USB adaptor, too! I'd like to take this opportunity to go on the record as saying Apple are stark-raving bonkers for dropping the Infrared port - their excuse that no-one was using it just doesn't wash. I mean at the time hardly anyone was using the USB port, so why not drop that???
Alan Gorman reports: " I have an older version of PalmPilot - the Professional, which I originally used to use in conjunction with Windows. It now HotSyncs with my iMac via a Keyspan USB serial adapter. On the whole no problems at all, though occasionally the system freezes on shutdown. I thought this freezing problem might be cured after installing OS 8.6. It's certainly better with OS 8.6, but not 100% freeze-free. The only way I know of guaranteeing freeze-free behaviour is to make sure the USB adapter is plugged in at start-up, and then, when all the HotSyncing etc has been done, to restart the computer, physically unplugging the USB adapter before the system has rebooted. Not satisfactory, I know, but I've got used to it now. (I haven't discovered any obvious extension conflicts.)"

I have a Umax 1220U scanner, bought from John Lewis. My fisrt unit developed a nasty squeak after 1 day - John Lewis delivered a replacement as soon as they could and as I still had the (otherwise functioning) squeaky one I wa snever without a scanner. Perhaps the Gods of Macintosh took pity on me, but again I've had no trouble installing it, and it seems to work OK and itegrates just fine with Photshop. Image quality seems excellent to my untrained eye, certainly for £109 inc VAT. Seems to be hot-pluggable. I couldn't find the CopyMachine software pictured on the box, but even scanning in large images on my unexpanded iMac it seems reluctant to crash the iMac. However...

USB hubs - I need one, and John Lewis sell the Belkin one. Anyone got one? Comments?

My Iomega Zip drive worked absolutely fine until, whilst saving a scan from the Umax onto it, the system crashed and I lost all the data on the Zip drive. I thought it was a faulty disc, but the same thing has happened to another disc - I opened a folder on the disc, the iMac crashed and apparently trashed the Zip. After rebooting, the finder reported the disk as 'unreadable by this machine' and gave me the option of reformatting it or forgetting the whole thing. This is very annoying, especially as a (beige) Mac owning friend says he has never had a problem with a Zip drive, even when he used them to play audio off in a touring theatre production.
Since upgrading my memory and moving to OS 8.5 I have not had any lost data or problems with Zips - so far!
The Zip drive does seem to be hot-pluggable - if you have a Windows98 machine at work you'd be able to take your Zip drive to work and get in on some cross-platform action.