Hi. I’m looking at buying an iMac. (again, i bottled it last year) I would need it to be able to run certain windows programs though. I’ve read about parallel things and actual windows install. Does anyone on here have experience of these? Memory-map is one example of software that i’d like to use. There are others that wor lass uses for her work.

I’ve not tried any virtualization progs yet and am going to install Virtual Box onetime to see you well it works, but I saw a mates new MacBook Air yesterday and he was running Parallels completely seamlessly (it can now strip out the virtual windows desktop so all you see is the pc program (excel, etc) running just like you would on a pc.
Windows programs started instantly and frankly it was very very good – but it was a top spec MBA with 8gb Ram.

I think VMware is better than parallels.

I recently used BootCamp (comes with the Mac) to install Windows 7 (have to buy it) on my iMac, so that my daughter could play Guild Wars.

I was pretty apprehensive, but it went well. First I cleared as much disc space as I could (overdue!), got about 100GB and assigned 60GB to Windows. Print out the instructions and follow CAREFULLY. It took a while but worked. Only trouble I had was installing the drivers once Windows was actually installed. It refused to run whatever it was, but I googled it and found a way to do it via command line and everything was fine. Pretty pleased with it TBH. (I’m a lifelong Mac user so still use that, but the Windows seems to be doing fine so far.)

Used to run memory map and was gutted when I moved over to mac but have never since needed windows. There is enough on- line mapping not to necessitate MM. Have you tried Bikehike which is just one of many sites?

MemoryMap runs on iOS, as does Viewranger. I honestly don’t know about on OS X, but installing Parallels is easy enough, then installing whatever flavour of Windows takes your fancy. With Parallels, it’s very easy to have both OS open at the same time and swap files between them, along with Linux, OS9, Win95/2000/…

That all sounds good. Cheers guys