Sorry All in advance for a couple of these newbie questions. I am seriously considering moving from PC to Mac as I am so annoyed with Windows hanging all the time, I seem to find myself spending more time trying to fix it than use the thing. That aside, I am currently using a Windows XP system with an AMD 2400 processor. I understand that the new IMacs have the Intel dual core 2.16 processor. My question is, In terms of computing power, how much quicker is the Imac over the 2400. 2 times, 3 times, more? I ask as I am unsure as to how the numbers (i.e 2400 and 2.16 ghz) describe the relative power of the processors and whether the Mac will give me a noticable difference over the system that I am using currently. I ask this before I go and shell out £1400 on a new Imac and find that I have wasted money. Also, can anyone tell me how successful windows is running on the MAC. I would rather dump the wretched OS all together personally, but the wife requires some of the apps for her work. Also will files saved from a PC onto an external hard drive be compatible with OSX. For example will pictures, music etc be compatible, will the hard drive need to be reformatted? Thanks all, hopefully you can help a newbie :-) James

From what I've seen/read you'll see a nice performance gain from the Core 2 Duo over the AMD. The C2D pretty much out performs any chip that AMD currently makes. For running Windows on the iMac you have 2 choices, BootCamp and Parallels. I'd chose Parallels over BootCamp as it lets you runs Windows programs along side of Mac programs while BootCamp requires you to reboot into a Windows only system. For the most part all your pics, music etc will work just fine in OS X. As for your external hard drive, OS X can read from NTFS formatted drives, but can't write to them. If the drive is FAT32 formatted you can read and write to it.

I am running parallels seamlessly right now, with heavy apps going in both (photoshop, final cut etc) with word and smaller programs as well - so yeah, parallels will do the job just fine. Also, macs aren't compatible with some external hard drives. at all. so i'd check that first. Otherwise, mac makes it all easier, quicker etc

I have worked with both PC and Mac. While a Mac processor may sound slower than a PC on paper, keep in mind it is not running all the Windows XP garbage in the background. My experience is that a 1.66 Ghz Mac is considerably faster than a 2.8 Ghz PC. I have a PC as my home computer but am so annoyed with Windows, that all my future computers will be Mac. You can also upgrade your Mac to a certain degree as well. You may not be able to upgrade your processor, but you are able to upgrade your HD and RAM.

Mac's are much more stable operating systems my OS X 10.2.8 I never have to fix, re-install the OS or anything. My WinXP machine gets spyware, and other annoying viruses, and i won't pay for anti-virus, because it sits in your system even after you get rid of it, the solution, is re-install winXP, but macs never get viruses and stay as fast as they came, as opposed to windows which slows every min. and mac are much eaiser to up-grade!