New to Mac

[MarkTheMac]

Hi there,

I'm buying a new computer in the next couple of months and am very tempted to go for a Mac for the first time but I have some questions if they could be answered that would be great!

1. In my work environment I am still going to need Windows for ASP.NET Software development. With Boot Camp will ALL windows applications run on this, along with web servers such as IIS?

2. I also want to play some Windows based games like Football Manager so does the same apply here? I have heard some people say that Windows games generally won't work in Macs regardless of Boot Camp but I'm not sure if they have their facts right.

3. If I can run Windows games in Boot Camp will I be able to upgrade to the top end graphics cards such as ATI Radeon 4870x2 should I ever want to play the top end windows games like Crysis? Or is this only possible on a Windows Machine with compatible motherboard?

4. What is the support like should my machine become faulty?

5. Do they come with Blu-ray and support HD?

6. Will my ISP support then (Virgin media) or will I have to use my internet through the Windows boot mode?

6. Should I go for the IMac or the Mac Pro taking into account what I have said in the above?

Thanks in advance

 

[Alexis]

1 and 2: Bootcamp is just a program that splits your hard drive into two and which contains a few windows drivers for the keyboard, mouse etc. Once you have Windows installed you have a fully functioning Windows machine like any other machine. Every single bit of Windows software will work perfectly - games, Asp.net, anything. It's fully native, not emulated.

You just hold down alt when you start up and you boot into Windows.

3: The graphics card is not upgradable - it's a chip soldered to the motherboard. My Radeon 2600 plays Crysis very well on medium settings though. Other games aren't quite as demanding - I can turn plenty of settings up to high in Call of Duty 4 for example.

4: They come with a year's warranty, after which you can pay for another 2 years if you wish.

5: There's no BluRay support at present, but it'll be no problem to plug in an external drive in the future with the next version of OS X I imagine. You can still download high definition films and watch them right now.

6: It depends on how you connect to the internet. Some cheap ADSL USB modems don't support Macs. 99.9% of ADSL modem routers do though (the ones with ethernet ports)

7: I think the Pro would be overkill. The iMac would be perfect.

 

[MarkTheMac]

Ok thanks a lot for that.

All sounds good