Just ordered 1st iMac - Advice on running win 8

[GaryClough]

Hi,

After 15 years of using pc's, I have had enough of noisy boxes, masses of wires, dodgy drivers, constant reboots, etc, I have decided to make the move to an imac.

As we have several Apple TV's, ipad, iPhone, iPod, in the family, it seemed like a good idea to make the jump to an imac.

I have just ordered a 27" imac with I7, 680MX and 3tb fusion drive. I have kept the standard 8gb memory and will update this to 32gb myself as apples price is too high.

I still need to run some windows applications such as Sage Accounting and plan on using parallels to run these. I also want to be able to play the occasional windows games cross a network against another pc and knew that parallels couldn't do this, so I planned on rebooting with bootcamp.

As a newbie to the world of mac, I have just realised that I can't do this with the 3tb drive. I cannot downsize as my iTunes library is already 1.5tb and I do not want the clutter of external drives.

I am wondering if it is possible to use a fast usb3 128gb memory stick, to install windows and the apps to and boot to this drive, accepting that I won't see the mac internal drive.

I have found lots of articles on bootcamp, but they all refer to running windows on the mac drive,

Is it possible to do what I have described ?

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Cheers
Gary

 

[NVRENUF!]

There is a program called Crossover which runs some windows programs with out the need of windows.

I tried it to run winamp.

See if that works before trying to load windows. never know.

 

[Dduval]

Try VMware fusion...supports windows 8. Then, wait a bit as apple will likely (hopefully) come out with a fix for 3tb drive and boot camp...my 2 cents.

I am wondering if it is possible to use a fast usb3 128gb memory stick, to install windows and the apps to and boot to this drive, accepting that I won't see the mac internal drive.

Someone else can jump in here, but this is unlikely. Even if you could, the performance hit would not be worth it in my opinion.

 

[torana355]

There is a way to run Bootcamp off an external but it requires some command line work in terminal. I also ordered the 3TB Fusion drive on my 27" iMac but im going to replace the 3TB drive with a 512GB SSD and run the 3TB drive externally in a USB3 enclosure.

 

[GaryClough]

Thanks for the advice. It looks like I cant do what I planned, at least not until boot camp is updated.

The VMware Fusions looks like a better choice than Parallels. The crossover software looks like an intersting option, I am just a little sceptical that it really can deliver, so might give the trial a go when I receive the iMac.

Thanks for all the comments, I can't believe how active and supportive this forum is, I look forward to getting into MacOs and will follow this forum with interest.

Cheers
Gary

 

[philosopherdog]

Consider booting from a thunderbolt drive, or just get an old pc. At first you think you need Windows. It will pass. Outside of gaming everything can be done. Bootcamp is much more reliable than any other alternative. Windows 7 is probably a better choice. It always takes a while before all the glitches are worked out. Good luck sounds like an awesome machine!