Kevin,
I'm also a PC user who has gone through the same thought process as you.
How does your friend like running XP on the Mac Pro? I've been considering doing the same thing on a dual boot basis with OS X (I also have a G4 Powerbook for my portable).
I have too many apps which are Windows-only and Parallels doesn't yet support all my hardware. So I can't go Apple as my primary OS. But this might give me interesting options for the future.
Thanks,
Paul
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Ya, I'm in the same boat. So far so good with my friend, he says the main problem is the Apple keyboard. He's tried a couple others but hasn't found one that works 100%, and it blue screens every week or so.
Then again he's also running boot camp, which is perfectly sensible. I made the bold suggestion to just re-format the whole drive with NTFS and do a clean install with XP Pro, but he wants to be dual-boot, which is definitely understandable.
And ya, Parallels is cool but doesn't work with everything yet, especially peripherals. Kudos to Apple for supporting it, but it's not quite ready for prime time. It will be soon I think, just not quite yet. Intel made it possible, but it's really new technology.
FWIW, now that Apple's hardware is finally on par I'd really like to make the switch since my desktop PC is fairly ancient, and beyond upgrading more than I already have. But NONE of my apps offer a cross-grade option, so it would cost me thousands in software alone to go full-on OSX everything, nevermind the time it would take to make it all work.
That's time and money I need to spend on marketing and creating new images, not a software -and- hardware switchover. I use Mac's almost every day for other things and I like them a lot, but it's a money and time hurdle more than a technical one right now. Oh well.