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Sorry to drag things back to basics but I'm new to Macs. I know this may sound a bit stupid but I bought my imac the other week with no intention of gaming on it as I still have my PC. The thing is I have now found out that I can have windows on a partitioned portion of my Mac hard drive and would like to try to do it. I understand that I have to by a full copy of windows and I am happy to buy it providing I'm not waisting my money.

I'm not planning anything other than playing games on it; Age of Empires II, Flight Sim (although I have read some horror stories already about this). I know I can get games for the Mac, however after buying Age of Empires II, I have compatibility issues with Snow Leopard. I just think that rather than replacing my games it may be easier to just put windows on my Mac.

The other thing that concerns me is that I would like to keep windows away from the internet to avoid viruses. If this isn't possible will anti virus slow the system down.

If anyone has any advice it would be appreciated, e.g don't bother or should be easy.
Thanks in advance.

Running Windows on your new Mac using the included Boot Camp assistant software is straight forward and easy to setup. I highly recommend printing out the Boot Camp instructions first and reading through them.

As for Windows and gaming, most folks recommend going with XP Home SP3 which can be purchased at NewEgg for around $93.00. That would be for the full install of a System Builder's copy of XP Home SP3. You can of course go with Vista or Win 7 instead. Your choice.

When Windows is running on your Mac from a Boot Camp partition, it's running natively and must be treated as such. You will need AV software, firewall, anti-spyware, and so forth. I (and others here) recommend using the new Microsoft Security Essentials program which included free AV and anti-spyware - malware.

I don't know what you heard regarding Flight Simulator, and since you didn't mention which Mac you have, I can't say how well it will run. However, generally, FS will run OK even with integrated graphics, albeit a bit choppy depending on settings.

Regards.

Thanks for the quick reply. I have taken on board your reply.
Just a quick addition to my question as you mentioned it and I didn't;
My Mac is an iMac
3.6 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor
4 GB 1067 MHZ Ram
ATI radeon HD4670 - VRAM 256Mb

Thanks again