Virtual PC

[Naru]

How good are these programs? I was going to get an iBook to take to uni as well as a PC, but finding these things is making me think that I can get away with just a Mac. Is this true?

I would be looking to run it on one of the new iMacs (it would be the cheeper one with the only upgrade being the RAM to 1gig, but that's not garenteed). How do you think it would run on this? i.e what level PC specs could I get out of it? Could I game with it at all or is that out of the question? I've got loads of PC programs I use (Macromedia, Adobe and MS Office the name the most common) that I'd use. (I don't do loads of art work, just image to mess about). Will they run fine?

Thanks for any help.

[Brother Munro]

They will run, SLOWLY. To be honest you'd be best off paying the money for MS Office 2004 for Mac instead of VPC. Dreamweaver I seem to recall is a dual platform disc, you should be able to install it to run Mac native (not sure on that one though).

[stigmata]

The problem with VPC is that it's what we in the business call, very fucking slow, for two reasons: first, it runs under slow emulation, which is a bottleneck; secondly, because you have to have significantly more RAM to run an emulated piece of software than a native one, because you also need to emulate Windows and give it RAM, and so on.

Unless you're on a dual 2.7Ghz G5 w/4Gb of RAM or more, just buy yourself a copy of Office 2004 and the others. It won't be cheap, but it'll be fast.

Or, buy yourself a PC: it looks to be the cheapest option by far for you. I recommend a Thinkpad. =)