Bootcamp Parallels or new PC

[Titus]

I'm getting ready to retire from teaching. I currently have a late 2009 27 inch iMac that I'll be giving to a friend. I also have a 4 year old Dell PC. I use Excel, Outlook and Word every day. I use the iMac for photo, video, and music.

I'm getting ready to buy a new iMac and am wondering if I should continue to use a PC for business/church/e-mail or just use bootcamp or parallels on the new iMac. I'm getting a SSD. Although my current iMac has 16 G Ram, I found that parallels made it very slow. I'm assuming a SSD and more RAM should cure that problem.

Any opinion?

 

[roadbloc]

The cheapest option is Bootcamp. But for what you do, any would suit you fine.

 

[yjchua95]

I'm getting ready to retire from teaching. I currently have a late 2009 27 inch iMac that I'll be giving to a friend. I also have a 4 year old Dell PC. I use Excel, Outlook and Word every day. I use the iMac for photo, video, and music.

I'm getting ready to buy a new iMac and am wondering if I should continue to use a PC for business/church/e-mail or just use bootcamp or parallels on the new iMac. I'm getting a SSD. Although my current iMac has 16 G Ram, I found that parallels made it very slow. I'm assuming a SSD and more RAM should cure that problem.

Any opinion?

More RAM won't cure it if it has 16GB, but an SSD will definitely cure it.

 

[cotak]

I also have a late 2008 27 inch iMac which has the dual core i5. It's got similar amount of ram and frankly it's slow now a days.

That's why it's moving to the wife and (a lot here would say sadly) I have moved back to a PC with the devil's canyon i7, SSD and 32 gigs of RAM. The price vs what you get just stopped making sense a few refresh ago for the Mac. For me the differential was $1.5k between getting an iMac and external accessories to match what I can do with a PC. So it was a no brainer.

It's feels a bit weird but not as bad as I though as I use and develop software in Windows at work. And actually it's kind of nice to be in touch with what's going on beneath the hood once again. It was sort of therapeutic putting all the bits together.

It's something to consider if you are retiring and no longer making a stable income. Macs are pricey and you just get better bang for your buck with a PC.

I have also found some interesting usability things which actually makes my windows PC better. The iMac's nice but the lack of heigh adjustment means my new 27 inch monitor is more comfortable to use. The keyboard I got now is also better than the Apple stock one. Of course I had ditched the magic mouse ages ago for a 3 button bluetooth one I used with my old dell laptop.

Really, windows 8.1 isn't so bad. Yes metro is still a bit of a meh. But the desktop being more or less same as win 7 is definitely an improvement over 8. Funny thing I have found is my new PC with win 8 is using less RAM than my iMac was. Interesting how it goes eh? I suspected that over the year since Snow leopard Apple was bloating OS X more and more and it seems now I can see it might be true. Who knew?

 

[z31fanatic]

A new iMac and Bootcamp makes the most sense in my opinion.

 

[Titus]

Thanks Everyone

I decided to downsize my iMac to a 21 inch with 16G Ram and SSD and buy a fast PC 32G SSD. I already have a nice 27 inch monitor for my PC and got great educational discounts on both the iMac and PC. I really like the iMac for video/photo/music and don't want to give that up.

Thanks again.