Some Progress

So, Windows XP is now installed on the iMac.  I haven't installed Boardmaker or Writing With Symbols yet because I'm still waffling on whether to stick with Boot Camp and deal with rebooting when necessary or to spring for Parallels or VMWare.

The advantage to Boot Camp is that it's free.  Parallels got mostly good reviews everywhere I looked, but VMWare's reviews were almost uniformly a variation of "So much better/faster than Parallels."

So we'll see.

Now I'm trying to get some of my programs off my PowerBook and onto the iMac.  Some of them (like Final Cut Express) will have to run under Rosetta (emulation)...which will be slower than universal binary or Intel native versions...but considering that video rendering went from .14 frames per second to 29ish frames per second...I'd imagine that even "slower than native" Final Cut will be...at least equivalent, if not faster, to how it was running on my laptop.

(Plus, big beautiful screen.)

The only remaining task is to get the files off my old PC (I've got several years of adapted books on there, for one thing) and to get an external CD/DVD drive for the iMac to run Writing with Symbols and Boardmaker concurrently.

(Unless I can find a way to trick the computer into thinking they're in the drive.  I tried that once years ago with a program used by gamers for the same essential reasons but it didn't work.  Basically, the program was supposed to make a copy of the disk and then mount it as a virtual drive, but I never could get it to work.  It may be worth exploring, now that I think about it.)

Incidentally, I like Cat's idea of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde name scheme for the iMac.  Unfortunately, I can't think of any fandom names for this except for Angel and Angelus (Angel) and John and Harvey (Farscape).

I'll keep thinking....