New iMac for the Kitchen

Over Christmas break, we decided it was finally time to upgrade our kitchen computer and bought a new 21.5″ iMac.  Our old computer had been an original Mac Mini, which was getting really slow even for simple stuff like browsing the web.  We were also really tired of the mess of wires, power bricks, etc. that it required – especially since it was on the kitchen counter and really attracted the crumbs and dust bunnies.

New iMac

The new iMac has been a huge improvement.  The display is big and beautiful and I love the fact that there’s no rats nest of cables on the kitchen counter anymore.  It can even stream HD TV without getting bogged down, which never would have been possible on the old Mac Mini.

The only negative we had with the new computer was an issue with it not being able to stream music to the Airport Expresses that we use for a kind of whole house sound system.  It was the strangest thing – the iMac could connect to the Airport Express to update the configuration, etc. and it would show in the list of remote speakers in iTunes, but when we’d try to stream music to it, there’d be a progress bar for a while, which would eventually disappear, and the music would never start streaming.  Since the Airport Express still worked fine when I streamed music to it from my laptop, I figured it was a problem with the iMac rather than the Airport Express or our network setup.  I started looking online and found a real variety of things to try, many of them changes to settings on our router or firewall and none of them seemed to make a difference.

Last week, though, I found an article about iTunes 9 and Airport Expresses not working correctly and the problems it described sounded exactly like what we were experiencing.  As it described, I tried disabling the iPv6 setting on the iMac and that corrected the problem so that we’re now able to stream music from the iMac to speakers elsewhere in the house.  Strange thing about this is that iPv6 is not disabled on my MacBook (which runs OS 10.5.8) and it works fine … guess it must be an issue with Snow Leopard.  Thought I’d share, though, in case anyone else is experiencing similar troubles.  Here’s a link to the article that describes how to fix the problem.

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