Finally pulled the trigger

T

TheLordsServant

Gawd
Joined
Sep 29, 2005
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Well after thinking long and hard, I pulled the trigger and ordered a refurbished aluminum iMac last night. I didn't get as much as I had thought out of my computers, so I was only able to afford the low-end model with the 2.0ghz Core 2 Duo and Radeon 2400XT. I really only do some light gaming, and my current rig is a eMachines with a 3.33 Celeron and Radeon x600, so I figure I'm still getting a heck of a performance upgrade. I'm supposed to receive it by the 18th.
 
Congrats! That will be a very nice upgrade from your current rig.

You comfortable with the OS Swap? And don't forget about Parallels if you need some MS action.
 
Yes, I plan on using MS, primarily because I'm homeschooled, and the I have to send all my work to a place in Virginia, and they aren't very Mac-friendly, so I still have to run Windows, unfortunately. So, I'll probably use Boot Camp instead, as I hear Parallels isn't terribly fast. The cool thing is I already have a copy of XP Home to put on it, so with Boot Camp, I should be good. And, I've been using Leopard for a few months on my Powermac G4 MDD, so the OS swap isn't really a swap, I actually really liked all the features Leopard had to offer over Tiger.
 
Actually for average use stuff Parallels runs pretty well for me. My spec's aren't much better than your iMac.

Stuff like Excel, IE, various every day use applications, there's no slow down. Just a bit of stuttering when moving the applications window since Parallels still gives it the OS X shadow when in coherence mode (which owns).

I wouldn't be able to stand having to constantly restart and boot into different OS's when needed.

Glad to have you on the Mac Train. :p
 
I really liked VMWare Fusion better than Parallels.

Just got it setup on a family members MBP the other night and it runs great.
 
Well, the thing is I'd probably want to do some light gaming, such as CS:Source, rFactor (Race Sim) Flight Simulator 04 etc. Not a hard-core gamer, just play older games occasionally to pass the time and have a little fun in life, so I don't know how well Parallels will run with only 1GB RAM and trying to play some of those games. I probably should look at upgrading to 2GB. I'll check out VMWare Fusion and see if that's somewhere I'd like to go. I've never had an Intel Mac, only PowerPC (But quite a lot of PowerPCs :D ) so all this is new to me.
 
I haven't tried VMWare Fusion but have used Parallels for some time now and on my Macbook it isn't that bad. I don't think I would try any gaming on it..but then again I can't really game on it anyway even if I was booted into XP ;) Also look into NeoOffice for a replacement to MS Office..works great and is FREE!!!
 
Having used both extensively and both of their bootcamp tie-in's and just plain boot camp too.

If you want something for at tie-in with OS X, set up a bootcamp partition and set up VMWare Fusion for it as well, Parallels required me to seek out too many fixes and keep up to date with happenings on their forums with issues with certain software... VMWare Fusion is just a much more polished product from a company with *much* more experience in the VM sector.

+ Boot Camp as a fall back and in the case you need the full rendering power of the GPU for w/e you're doing, etc..
 
Optional: That is exactly what I plan on doing, so that if I just need to run Windows for a few minutes or something, than I can simply launch VMware, but if I'm doing serious Windows use, I can use boot camp. I have already ordered VMWare Fusion from Newegg, it's supposed to be here by the time my iMac is. And, I have used NeoOffice before, and I absolutely love it, I don't know why anyone would want to buy Office for so much more money.
 
It's here! So far, I can't tell it's not a new computer, and the 18 bit display doesn't bother me in the slightest. With the positioning of my desk, the glare isn't annoying at all. I'm happy to report no dead or stuck pixels, or other defects.
 
VMWare Fusion is a lot quicker than parallels I found. Parallels felt like an emulator while VMFusion felt like a native OS.
 
I would attest that to VMWare Fusion supporting SMP where as Parallels does not.
 
Well, I've got Boot Camp up and running, and it seems to be quite fast. Much faster than even I expected. Though I do have to reboot to switch, it boots up and down so fast it isn't an annoyance to me.
 
If you need to send your files to a non-mac friendly environment and they use ms office formats just get open office. They recently released a version that doesn't use x11. I am unsure about the gaming though.
 
Well, after a week, I absolutely love it. I literally have not touched any of my other computers since I bought it, this thing is bloody outrageous!
 
Now get the fun stuff like gimmesometunes, coversutra, the clock screensaver and all those awesome widgets. :)
 
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