I am looking at buying my first mac.
I consider myself pretty good at computers. I have never used a mac but I was a system administrator for about 100 pc's and a dozen unix machines when I was in college about 8 yrs ago.
At my current job (self employed) I use several industry specific programs that are windows only. These programs are not popular, are very targeted towards a small group of users I know there is no mac alternative. I have read there is parallels and vmware to run any windows app in a emulator so i know a mac could run them.
Here is how my computer use breaks down:
3-4 hours a day of the specialed windows apps (probably over 50% of my computer time)
email
quickbooks
quicken
web browsing
word
excel
itunes
pdfs
I know the mac will natively do everything else in the list but since over half my time is with wiindows only apps does it make sense to switch to a mac? I hear that the mac's generally outperform pc's but how does running a windows app in a emulator window on a mac compare to running on a native windows machine? Some of my programs are pretty CPU intensive. One in particular you set up and it takes several hours to process on my HP DV7 (i7 with 6 gb ram).
I consider myself pretty good at computers. I have never used a mac but I was a system administrator for about 100 pc's and a dozen unix machines when I was in college about 8 yrs ago.
At my current job (self employed) I use several industry specific programs that are windows only. These programs are not popular, are very targeted towards a small group of users I know there is no mac alternative. I have read there is parallels and vmware to run any windows app in a emulator so i know a mac could run them.
Here is how my computer use breaks down:
3-4 hours a day of the specialed windows apps (probably over 50% of my computer time)
quickbooks
quicken
web browsing
word
excel
itunes
pdfs
I know the mac will natively do everything else in the list but since over half my time is with wiindows only apps does it make sense to switch to a mac? I hear that the mac's generally outperform pc's but how does running a windows app in a emulator window on a mac compare to running on a native windows machine? Some of my programs are pretty CPU intensive. One in particular you set up and it takes several hours to process on my HP DV7 (i7 with 6 gb ram).