[Discussion] Thinking of going IMAC

[D Burch]

Well Gerry,

You certainly got a lot of input.

"I do not relish the need of researching Video cards and drivers,
printers, ACPI bioses, buggy Lucide and Flash, etc....etc. "

My very reason for going to Apple. It just all seemed to be in one very 
nice little box. To date, the hardware has been very good, no issues.  I 
bought a MAC Mini so can only  do so much with respect to hardware. That 
keeps money in my pocket. I hooked into a Sharp Aquos 32" HD TV for a 
monitor. The video output is phenomenal.
I did not find the same with the Leopard/Snow Leopard OS. I do not 
understand why companies who make peripherals will not update their 
drivers so life can go on interrupted. Mac OS is plagued by the same 
hardware support stupidity as Vista. The Snow Leopard upgrade fixed some 
OSX issues, but support for my printer was dropped by HP.
Many of the software limitations experienced in OS/2 are there in Mac 
OS. There some saviors. Neo-office handles a good range of office tasks 
and the filters are kept current. It is easy to send financial support 
based on usage. I found a nice scanner product , Firefox and Thunderbird 
work well although I have moved to Safari for most browsing.

Ernie noted that it is HP's responsibility to produce drivers. This is 
true, but way back  when W95 was being developed it was common knowledge 
- or seemed to be, that MS had an active approach to bring vendors on 
side to develop drivers. IBM & Apple would respond if contacted (passive).

For the long haul, I have a concern the Apple will place more emphasis 
in its iPhone wet dream, and the innovation in it's computing line will 
diminish. The Imac division has contributed nothing to the current shine 
the company has.

"SO, thinking of going to IMAC  27", 1 tb hd and then using Parallels
V5 and loading Snow Leopard v10.6, eCS GA and winXP. "

I bought VMWare Fusion, so have no experience with trying to setup a 
Parallels virtual machine. An acquaintance  built  a  Warp 4  virtual 
machine for Parallels. He didn't not bother to get everything working, 
just satisfied himself that it could be done.
I got tired of RC6 instability on 2 mainboards I have tried it on.
XP works well as Ernie reported and it accomplishes what I want. That 
being said, I find Leopard to be a bit dated in some basic internal task 
management and memory handling. Maybe the move to Intel was not as well 
thought out as the Motorola based OS. My opinion is just that. I am not 
tech savvy enough to quantify my observations.  I remember what OS/2 2.1 
felt like on a 386-40  a long time ago. For all of the feet that have 
walked the technology path since then, I do not feel that what I have 
today is significantly better.

"Is Parallels Desktop for MAC a major or minor install challenge?? "

Should be fine. A word of caution based on VMWare. You can share files 
easily, so you do not need a huge default virtual machine - maybe 10GB 
max. VMWare also takes snapshots by default. Mine was set for every 
hour, which was never a big deal until I left the app. loaded overnight. 
OOPS. No drive space.

I think that if you are staying in Win XP and OS/2 it is just as easy to 
have separate machines, network them as use as required. Check the Snow 
Leopard site to see make sure your peripherals are supported in the 
current OS release.

That is about all I can tell you. I did get my copy of Unix for OSX 
Tiger and it looks very interesting, but I am not sure if I  want to 
rally go that route at this time.

Don