There are tools online that can tell you what sort of memory your PC takes:

http://www.crucial.com/index.asp

A memory upgrade may be all you need. How much ram do you have now?

First off, I would like to say thanks to Gio~logist for starting this discussion, and to Nexialys and Danny for the extremely useful information and insight.

My husband and I have been thinking about making this transition, as well, and I've been feeling VERY intimidated by the idea! Having used nothing but PC's up to this point, a Dell Dimension most recently, I'm comfortable and in my groove (read: set in my ways...hehe). However, if this transition will be as smooth and easy as you guys make it seem, I'm all for it, and would LOVE to own a MAC!

Having visited our local Apple Store, and the online store, I was amazed by their computers! There's no tower...the hard drive is IN the monitor! Just blows my mind that it can be done that way. I'm also the proud owner of an iPod Nano. Prior to receiving my Nano as an anniversary gift, I was happy just having a CD Walkman and didn't understand what all the fuss was about with the iPods. WHOA!! That TINY piece of equipment is like my best friend...it goes with me EVERYWHERE!

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that, I believe it's possible that Apple's technology reaches beyond all others. Their products ARE more expensive, but for a very good reason: they're worth it.

RAM, Mhz.... actually, the slowest Mac on the store is faster than any Dell... they provide 2 or 3 models of each just for the maniac of details.

the only detail really is the RAM... the more apps you want to run at the same time will make your decision... i actually have 1.5Gigs on my Mac Pro, and this is not needed to add more in my situation. 800Mbs are reserved for the webserver and the rest for my apps... Photoshop is always running on 75% of the RAM i have so i do not have to calculate that detail.

you can now decide if you go for a tower or a iMac... the Towers are flexible for hard-drives, video cards, network extensions... but aside of that, they are the same as the iMac...

remember that you do not have drivers on a Mac... even if you buy a PC printer or keyboard... you do not need to configure and seek the specs of your extensions to see if they work on a Mac... just lately, i bought a new keyboard (baby dropped my coffee in my old one), and i bought the cheapest Microsoft keyboard (8$... yep... 8$) and in the specs it was noted to not work on a Mac... the only detail not working was the Alt key switched with the Control key,.... so yes, even Microsoft makes Mac keyboard!.. lol

if you are not into gaming, that's less questions... everybody know that Mac have less games, but when you have Windows installed in your bootcamp you can run PC games like in the most powerful PC... you just need a little extra RAM!

i'm not a Mac fan only... you see, i can tell you that you can run everything PC into a Mac... the detail is that a PC ...CAN'T run Mac apps... even if you have something virtual, the shelled Mac emulators are 25% efficient... for the PC/Windows fans or the guys in need of both technologies, the only solution is a new Mac.. :)

oh, btw, when i talk about no need to upgrade when you buy a Mac... it was not about a self-upgradable Mac, but a comparaison with most of the PC sellers that will provide you with free upgrades to make it work with Vista... on a Mac, even with the new OS released in 4 months, no need to tweak your computer to make it work... OS-X Leopard works on a Summer 2001 iMac... (ok, it is slower, but it works! - no tweak)

Good luck! And you're welcome heh ;)



640mb.. Trying to figure out the model of my computer, not in system information (after clicking properties of my comp), hmm. I really need to update my knowledge on this, i hate not knowing so much about something!

As I understand it, Bootcamp is the dual boot solution while Parallels (And now VMWare) are the virtualization products...so using bootcamp would not necessarily require extra memory to function (Outside of Windows being a memory hog :) )

As an interesting foot note, We have 2 iMacs in our lab running Windows XP exclusively...no OSX partition. You have to pre-partition the drive using the OSX setup disk. Make the whole thing NTFS and then boot off of the XP CD to setup up. Use the Bootcamp driver CD once it is all done and you have an OSX-less Mac. Why you would want one is another story ;)

http://www.parallels.com/landingpage...FRGsGgodDGX7og
http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

If you want to run OSX on a pc without it being virtual, you can do that too:

http://www.osx86project.org/

You can buy an Intel dual core PC (same cpu MAC uses) with a massive hard drive and 4gigs of ram for less than $1000.

A mac with those features would probably cost close to $2000 or more in some cases.

It's and interesting alternative if you are on a budget.

GIO, if you have a p4 2.66 you need standard ddr pc2700. That will be just fine in your dell, now you just have to decide how much you want, 512mb 1gb etc.

Thanks a lot ! :)

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati....asp?CatId=549

Seems cheap, i might get me about 2 more gb

Do not get a 2gb single module, get 2 1gb memory modules.

Besides being illegal and locking you into a system you can not upgrade easily it is a good alternative. I loaded OSX into a VMWare session using these instructions, as well as a gx620 for testing. Far from perfect but it does work.

However, the point of my post was not running OSX on non Apple systems, but running windows on Apple systems. Apple makes some very good hardware. I just ran through some configs from Dell and Apple, and you are right on the price issue...Mac Mini vs Inspiron 530s is a good example of similar systems and the price difference is more than noticeable...and you are losing out on hard drive space.

Oh, ok. Any recommended brands? Considering i already have 645mb or so, i hope i have space for the extra 2gb slots.