Imagine having two completely different personalities inside of you. Well, my new iMac does (sort of)! This is a screen capture of what I am now doing with my new iMac. I am running "Photo Impact," a Windows-only program, on my iMac. How?

This iMac is a model G5 that has Intel duo core (ie. it has two "brains" and runs Intel software). Since Windows was written for Intel chips - the iMac can run it. With a program I bought called "parallels," I can actually have the Windows task bar at the bottom of the OS X screen and use it like normal. Meanwhile the iMac (its "Windows" program is called OS X - I am using the Leopard version) is also running OS X. I can swap between the two systems, drag and drop, and even put Windows programs onto the OS X "Dock" like they were actually OS X programs. BTW, the Dock is a VERY handy way of starting, looking for, stopping, changing programs (and it can be made to auto-hide like the Windows Task Bar).

This pic also shows an OS X Finder window opened to the folder where I have the pic of the purple CREB beehive. This is the program used in place of Window's Explorer. I simply had to drag the pic from the Finder into Photo Impact and start working on it.

Doesn't running two machines at once - on the same machine, slow things down? Yes and no.

Somewhat, yes b/ct I do not have much memory in this machine compared to what it can hold. I want to get more so it will go faster. However, the iMac is running Windows faster than my actual Windows machine (that died on me) could and it was a 3 GHz machine. There is an option in Parallel's to give one system more attention.

Somewhat no b/c I can "pause" the Windows system if I am going to use memory intensive programs on the OS X side.

So why couldn't I run OS X and Windows on my Windows machine - why did I need an iMac? Although both are intel machines, Apple has not released OS X for people with non-Apple Intel machines. There is an illegal hack of it floating around the internet, but the pirates say they are having compatibility problems getting it to run on Windows flawlessly. I am guessing the reason may be that the iMac is UNIX based (stable - the internet is UNIX based - now we know why it does not crash!) and Windows machines are not. The non-Apple machines are not able to run both at the same time - again - probably b/c they are not UNIX based (???).

One more question that has come up before. Why did I get an iMac if I was only going to use it to run Windows programs anyway? Well, I am NOT going to run Windows programs as much as possible. Photo Impact is, to me, the best, most user-friendly and powerful graphics program out there. And you do not need to take a night course in school to use it. The price is right - about 8.00 on eBay for a former version which is powerful enough to do all that I need to with insulators (Bob Alexander first told me about it). I have extensive background with both Apple and Windows. I just prefer Apple. Since i needed Photo Impact, I needed Windows for one program.

The little circle in the upper left is the speech recognition function - built in - you can use it to give commands verbally - it even tells Knock-Knock jokes when you tell it to!

And one more thing for all those old AMIGA users out there: The AMIGA supposedly inspired the NeXT machine (looked and felt like it!). The NeXT machine's OS (NeXT Step) is now on iMac's as OS X. I feel right at home again.