paulr

The ones where the hard drive,memory,power supply and all the rest are built into the monitor. I think Sony do them.(for windows btw)

Anyway,my question is what are the downsides to this. Why havent they taken off.What about the fan noise as its right in front of you.
The reason i ask is my office at home is very small and it would give me more leg space. Plus they look cool.

thanks
Paul.

ScoobyDoo555

yeh - look cool. Not too sure about expandability ...........

Dan

twistybits

With MS office, Word, Excel and Powerpoint+ Entourage(Outlook for the MAC)

Have you considered one of these?

Apple (UK and Ireland) - iMac

I know you said PC but worth a go.....(I made the switch over 6 months ago and havent looked back)

Markus

I second the iMac, and the new models are Intel based so you can dual boot, thus have OS X and XP SP2 on the same machine. It's practically silent as well and I've not had any overheating problems.

The main downside is with expansion. You can upgrade RAM with ease, but you can't really upgrade the graphics card. The hard drive could probably be upgraded, but you'd need to pull the machine apart and that'll void your warranty.

wez_sti

Cost and expanability are the main things i reckon...

As customer has a Sony Vaio one, looks the absolute nads! has it in his kitchen, looks very smart, esp with the wireless vaio keyboard and mouse...

Wez

GaryK

Markus,

Is parallels really that good do you know? Im pondering on a 24" imac at the mo but I really want some real world views on its performance. Ive read some reviews that all gave it the thumbs up. Dont want to be dual-booting.

Gary

Neanderthal

iTrader: (6)

Have you not thought about a laptop instead?

Markus

Gary,
What do you want to use Parallels for? If it's gaming or anything that would use DirectX or 3D graphics, for example AutoCAD, then forget it it won't work. Currently Parallels does not do DirectX, mainly as it requires direct interaction with the graphics hardware. It also does not have USB 2.0 support, but I understand that is being worked on.

I've used it since the first beta and was very impressed with it, it just worked right out of the box. I've got 1.5GB RAM on the iMac and usually assign 512MB to a virtual machine and it's pretty quick. Bootup of XP takes around 10 seconds.

I use Parallels mainly for testing of various server platforms, I've got virtual machines for Windows 2000, Windows 2003 (both Standalone server and Active Directory), SLES 9, SLES 10, and Fedora Core 5.

They all seem to run very happily with no real issues.

I do have XP, as mentioned previously and it does not get heavy use but I've run the Office Applications and a few other things within it without any problems. Even used BitTorrent within it to download a few things and it seemed happy. Yes it does slow down the host a bit when you're doing heavy duty stuff, but that's to be expected.

Apple themselves recommend Parallels on one of their switching pages, so that speaks volumes.

Buster-WRX

Gary,

I bought the 24" imac about 6 weeks ago all I can say is

I use it for video editing (dv camera) and photo editing.
I also have a large itunes library (45GB)
The performance is great and it looks the nads.

Don t even hesitate.
The standard software is a doddle to use and very clever.

Buster

GaryK

Thanks guys, just gonna run fairly mundane stuff Markus like SQL Server and some dev tools which are windows only, sounds like it will be up to the job.

Yes Buster a friend of mine has just bought a 24" and once I picked my jaw up off the floor I had a play and was impressed, I run OS X on a powerbook anyway but using VPC in the past was horrific.

Gary

cottonfoo

SQL Server will eat your memory, so you'll need to assign it a lot.

I just checked MS's requirements page for SQL Server, I love how they recommend a screen resolution, how lame

paulr

http://www.lionscomputers.com/Sony_V...ktop_LCDTV.jpg

I cant be bothered to learn a whole new OS so the Mac is out. One big downside is monitor upgrade?

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

learning a whole new OS as you put it is nothing really...
I have tons of mates who were dye in the wool PC users and I have converted all of them bar a few to macs and the rest, well they wont budge yet, but at least I have rid them of fecking AOL !!

put it this way, a PC user or windows user would find it easier to find his way around a mac than a mac user getting to grips with a windows machine..speaks volumes

they are so similar these days its scarey..

but if you are determined to stay with windoze then get something else than that pig ugly sony model you posted....and I thought sony knew a thing or two about asthetics

Markus

Mac OS X isn't that different to Windows, plus as I said, on the latest Macs you can run Windows XP as well (could even run it only in windows if you want) so you don't have to learn a new OS if you really don't want to.

To be quite frank, deciding not to purchase a specific computer based purley on the OS is a rather poor excuse.

Screen sizes of iMacs range from 17" (which is what I have) up to the latest 24"

You can also add one additional monitor to the iMac, and I've also done this, have a 17" external. Makes for a pretty good setup.