[windwardtrades]

I'm about to buy a iMac 17 or 20 and am trying to sort out how I am going to best use some of the windows software I have. Specifically, I use Photoshop and Illustrator CS and most of Macromedia MX suite now and understand I can make a windows partition and dual boot. But, having dual booted Win and linux for years, I have a strong preference not to dual boot.

I think my options are to sell or swap my win software for native mac versions or use versions that use the Rosetta emulation. I understand there is a performance penalty for emulation.

So my question becomes, what versions of CS as well as MS Office will run natively and without emulation on a new Intel iMac. Any insight, thoughts, etc are really appreciated.

[iMacfan]

You might be getting a bit confused, as there are currently no intel native versions of Office or CS - there will be within the next six months or so, but not at the moment as the switch has only (relatively) just happened.

Dual booting isn't really that bad an option - with such a quick machine, it doesn't take that long to boot, just hold down the option key at startup, and a nice graphical menu shows you your options.

As for intel native OSX alternatives - NeoOffice is free, and many find it a more than good enough alternative, as it opens and saves into all MS Office docs. I don't know anything about pro graphics, so I'll leave someone else to answer that one.

David

[jmgriff]

Two options to consider would be CrossOver Mac or Parallels Desktop. Either should allow you to run at least some of your Windows software simultaneously with Mac OS X, but they work in different ways. I haven't much experience with this, having just got an Intel Mac myself, but you'd probably have more success posting in the 'Alternative Operating Systems' forum.

Good luck!

[quiklee]

parallels works well . . . i heard that the crossover mac software is still in beta and has some bugs right now

[soonlar]

I am using the new CrossOver for Mac with Office 2000. It appears to work fine so it may be an option for you. I haven't seen any benchmarks on this option yet in how this would compare performance wise in running CrossOver for Mac vs Office for Mac using Rosetta vs Parallels running windows with MS-Office. The same comparison could be pondered for CS and Macromedia as well.