Thinking about a new high end computer
I have a client, a radiologist, who needs a new home computer. Since he uses this computer when he is on-call it must meet minimum requirements for the medical imaging software and display the images in high resolution on a large monitor so that he can properly read the images.
He sent me his specifications and asked for my thoughts. Here they are:
The nicest reasonably priced, large monitor is bundled with the new 27" iMac. One of these with a 2.8GHz i7 CPU and 8GB of memory (which I believe is more than adequate) costs $2,399 plus tax at Apple. Adding a second Apple display, a 24" Cinema Display costs $899 + tax. Not certain you need the 2nd monitor as a 27" primary monitor is quite large. Also the second monitor does not have to be an Apple.
Firefox is available for all major operating systems, Windows, Mac and Linux. So if Safari doesn’t cut the mustard, I would expect that Firefox will work. As always, better to test this on a existing Mac, before buying, rather than assume.
We can run XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32-or 64-bit) on a Mac either under the built-in Boot Camp utility (which I do not like because it means rebooting the machine to switch operating system) or in a virtual machine (VM) using VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, or VirtualBox. I prefer VMware Fusion over Parallels or VirtualBox. This would entail buying the VM software and a Windows OS and license, and installing the VM manager and then the operating system.
This might be the best of all worlds, great display, good hardware, and your choice of OS depending upon what you want to do. Please note that you will have to maintain two computers, the physical Mac and the virtual Windows, so updates, patches, and backups are times two.
Let me know if you have other questions or would like to discuss this. If you want to go with a desktop computer, and not an all-in-one like the iMac, we could consider the Mac Pro (which gets pricey very fast) or a higher-end Windows 7 64-bit machine with XP Mode. The Windows machine would probably cost $1,000 to $2,000 less than the Mac Pro (depending upon configuration). The advantage of a desktop is that is more serviceable and upgradeable. An iMac is more like a notebook in its construction and consequently harder to service and limited in upgrades, i.e. the video and sound cards/chips are fixed with whatever comes with the computer. Memory and hard drives can be upgraded.