What is it with iMacs eh? If it's not one thing it's another.

Question

Okay, nothing disasterous, but annoyances that mount up.
To cut a long story short, I started off on a Mac mini, and was so impressed I decided I wanted something with more oomph, so got took it back to the store within 10 days and traded up to a 20" Intel iMac. But I sold that in a fit of madness and poverty after 4 months. Doh!
In the time I owned it I loved it, apart from these annoyances:
- Mighty Mouse (and any USB optical mouse) caused interference on headphone socket (I tried many different mice, headphones and speakers)
- Superdrive was very noisy and clunky from putting in the disk to reading to writing to ejecting the disk (what happened to the slot drives Apples used to have that slowly, silently sucked the disk in eh?)
- Start-up chime was too noisy / not disableable (is that a word?)
Okay, now here I am a few months later, missing it like aitch-eee-double-ell, and so I've taken the plunge again and bought another 20". And so far I'm loving it again, apart from these annoyances:
- Mighty Mouse (and any USB optical mouse) still causing interference on headphone/line-out socket (I tried many other different mice, headphones and speakers - finally I've discovered that a ball mouse or laser mouse does not cause any interference)
- Superdrive maybe not quite as noisy and clunky as the original iMac I had, but still cheap sounding.
- Start-up chime seems to be louder! Anybody know how I can disable or at least reduce the volume of this?
- 250gb hard-drive is actually only 232gb... where's the other 18gb gone? I could fit my music collection into that! And before anyone states the obvious - that 232gb is the disk size, not the remainder after the system and software has been added.
- Hard-drive seems to noisier and slower too, its general background whirr seems louder and more noisy, but definitely disk reading and writing is noisier and slower... plus it seems to make the machine vibrate more than it did before.
Okay, these might seem minor annoyances but they mount up and are not what you expect when you have paid £1200 for what is supposed to be the best PC (I use that term in its pure sense, as in 'personal computer' not as in IBM/PC Compatible) in the world.
The drive is listed as a WDC WD2500JS-40NGB2 - I guess that means it is a Western Digital? I'm sure my other iMac had a Maxtor? The iMac packaging says it was made in China. Dunno if that makes any difference - I've heard that they have been made in Malaysia, California and Ireland as well.
Hmmm... perhaps I should have stayed with the G4 Mac mini that I had no problems with whatsoever, for Garageband etc, kept my ahem IBM/PC compatible for the heavy duty stuff like video-editing, games-playing and number-crunching, and saved myself £700-800?

Answer 1

"Start-up chime seems to be louder! Anybody know how I can disable or at least reduce the volume of this?"
There used to be an application available at Version Tracker that would disable the startup sound. I can't remember the name of it off hand nor do I know if it will work with and Intel mac but you might try searching for it.
You could plug in a pair of headphones or earbuds or the like which will make the start up chime much less loud, or a set of external speakers and not turn them on until after the chime sounds.
" Superdrive maybe not quite as noisy and clunky as the original iMac I had, but still cheap sounding."
Can't help you there.
"- 250gb hard-drive is actually only 232gb... where's the other 18gb gone? I could fit my music collection into that! And before anyone states the obvious - that 232gb is the disk size, not the remainder after the system and software has been added."
Already answered.
"- Hard-drive seems to noisier and slower too, its general background whirr seems louder and more noisy, but definitely disk reading and writing is noisier and slower... plus it seems to make the machine vibrate more than it did before."
Tough one to deal with online. Does it seem like your Mac is accessing the drive more than you remember as compared to your first one? Do you have less ram in this one perhaps? I am not sure about the vibration issue as there are a lot of variables to consider such as location and others but if it seems to vibrate excessively you might want to take it to a repair center and have it looked at. Maybe the drive is not fastened tightly or something.