07-26-2011, 02:03 PM

Hi all, I'm new to the forums and have been looking through multiple threads to learn more about Macs. I presently have a 3-yr old Dell Inspiron and a Dell laptop (at work so I don't know pertinent details about them). I mostly use my computer at home for pleasure and have a tremendous amount of casual PC games that I have been buying from Big Fish Games for playing when retirement comes (in a couple of years). Most of them are on an external drive, as are a huge amount of photos and music files.

My question is would these be playable on an IMac without any difficulty or would only the Mac versions work. I don't want to have to double spend on these games and have purchased a couple of the same ones for the IPad. I've read about Boot Camp and Parallel but don't really understand it all. I'm fairly computer literate but don't like setting up new computers, like the pros to do it for me. I'm using Vista and have had no problems.

Can anyone shed any light on the issue so an old girl like me can decide if it would even be feasible for me to make a trip to the Apple store. I spend a lot of time on the computer but don't want to get into something that might cause me a lot of stress if I didn't know what was going on.

Thanks in advance for any light on the subject

07-26-2011, 05:13 PM

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

By all means take a trip to your local Apple store and let the very knowledgeable salespeople that work there demo an iMac for you. If you're currently using Vista (ugh) you won't have any difficulties with the Mac operating system.

As for Windows games, they're best played by setting up a dual boot using Boot Camp. The sales folks at the Apple store can explain everything to you. You might also want to read our Sticky post at the top of the "Running Windows........" forum which explains about running Windows on a Mac.