computer choice and software for newbie

[gicent]

I have an old PC desktop that I need to replace. I just bought, about 4 months ago, a great dell laptop. I am considering a high-end pc vs mac. Is there any photo software that I might miss if I go with the mac? I realize that I could run pc based software on a mac(I guess I would have to buy a windows based operating system as well) but how much of a hassle timewise, to workflow, and to my pocketbook would this be? WIll this slow my computer down substantially? I have photoshop CS2 for pc's so I would have to get a mac version-this would be ok if its for the long haul. I am just getting into working with photoshop. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[marxz]

I have an old PC desktop that I need to replace. I just bought, about 4 months ago, a great dell laptop. I am considering a high-end pc vs mac. Is there any photo software that I might miss if I go with the mac? I realize that I could run pc based software on a mac(I guess I would have to buy a windows based operating system as well) but how much of a hassle timewise, to workflow, and to my pocketbook would this be? WIll this slow my computer down substantially? I have photoshop CS2 for pc's so I would have to get a mac version-this would be ok if its for the long haul. I am just getting into working with photoshop. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

given Mac's ("almost but _not quite_") total dominance of the professional graphics industry _most_ serious image editing software from the major software houses is available for Mac (and in a few rare cases only for mac) but yeh there are quite a few "enthusiast" and smaller software developers (usually one/two man shows) that have "Pro" graphics software that's Windows only.

one of the advantages of the new intel macs is that they can run Windows (or linux) either though native boot (boot camp) or through virtualisation ( ie Parallels).

Native boot (booting in to windows) is best for pure performance as there is no overhead (memory usage/processor load) from the host system (Mac OS)
However performance in virtualisation is still pretty good (at least 80% but usually better of native boot performance).
Because with the Intel chip there is no processor load from hardware emulation were as under the old PPC chip Macs you were using intel emulation software such as Virtual PC and the performance could be as little as 20% (80% degradation) of a similar spec intel or native mac programs mac.

note that if you want to run BOTH native boot AND virtualisation you will need to do two seperate installs of the Windows OS (and take twice as much disk space) I work in tech support and we spent several weeks trying to work around this but it's a no show. You can install most windows apps just once in to a separate from either windows environment Windows formated drive partition, you can save your user data to this partition (by setting the "My Documents" properties to map it to the separate partition). So the you can reduce the double hard disk space hit down to just being for the 2 actual Windows operating system installs.

As to do you need to have a licensed copy of Windows? - legally yes you do, if you have a written off PC you can appropriate the license from that.
If you go for both bootcamp and parallels my understanding is that you won't need two separate licenses as you are installing the same license on to the same machine and, most importantly, you will not be running both installs at the same time.

a heads up on the new intel macs is that if you don't have universal code for a mac application then it will run slow... Photoshop CS2 is a nightmare of slowness on an intel mac if you're coming off a PPC mac or a Windows box. So if you have a choice of a Windows version or an old non universal Mac version I'd recommend using the Windows version under bootcamp or Parallels or upgrading to the Universal mac binary version