Thinking of buying a iMac

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I'm thinking of buying an iMac 27", i know there's a new iMac on the horizon so i will wait for that, i've been a long time Windows user but i don't want to spend a ton on upgrading the PC, i have a couple of questions if i do go for an iMac.

Is there a equivalent Microsoft Office 2007?

Can I use torrents?

Can I connect my Xbox 360 to it?

I have 4 NTFS hard drives full with data, some people say NTFS is compatible and some don't?

Are they worth it? (You guys opinion)

Will i be able to play games such as Mafia II, Heroes of Newerth, LFD2, WoW, Dota 2, also are most of the games playable through Steam?



Cheers!
 
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1) Yeah there's a version of Microsoft Office available here.

2) Yes torrents are fine, there are many programs to use, uTorrent for example.

3) Yes you can using third part software, maybe this?

4) I believe so, I can see and move files off my NTFS windows partition, I cannot write to it however.

5) They are pretty good, the downsides I found coming from a custom PC are lack of upgradability and mobile versions of the graphics chipsets, so not as powerful. However the screens are good, although a bit reflective due to the glass.

6) Best bet would be to bootcamp to a Windows partition then you get full native usage of Windows and the performance increase that goes with it.

Edit : If you can pop into an Apple Store with a few questions and things to try out on the iMacs there?
 
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Yeah i've been into the Apple store a couple times, always packed, they look sweet, i've tried the OS out looks nice and smooth, i would just need to get use to it.

Also i would need to write to it unless i can transfer my files off and reformat it to a different format, also how does Bootcamp work exactly is it virtual machine or dual boot?

Cheers for the reply bud.
 
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No worries :)

You can get software to allow writing to NTFS, but I have had issues in the past. I think that only FAT32 is available to read/write to from OSX natively?

And yeah, bootcamp is simply dual boot. It's very easy to use and is built into OS X.
 
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VaderDSL has most of this covered, but just to clarify:

What exactly do you mean by connecting your 360 to it? Do you want to use the iMac as an external display (not possible with the Thunderbolt models)?

As for games, it of course completely depends on whether or not the games are available for Mac OS X, but either way, if you are planning to install Windows on the system, I'd install and run them on Windows instead; for pretty much every Mac OS X game out there, the Windows version runs better.
 
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Good points lamboman I totally overlooked the physically connecting the xbox to the iMac rather than just accessing the iMac media from the xbox.

The new 2011 iMacs requires a thunderbolt to thunderbolt so as lamboman says, you can't physically connect the xbox to the iMac.
 
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See i didn't really want to use Windows 7, otherwise i would use a PC, thinking about it now, i'm not so sure if it would be totally worth it, i may just upgrade my PC, because i have 3 hard drives most nearly full, and looking at options for external hard drives such as Drobo etc, they just look really slow.

And when i mean't connect my Xbox 360 to it, meaning use the iMac as a monitor for it.
 
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NTFS will read in OSX but it won't write to it without software such as Turexa NTFS. I have used it with no issues but only when I had to write to an odd ntfs drive. I use mac partitioned. Problem with fat32 is the 4gig file size limit. Bit of a problem when transferring video files and some disk images.

You can't connect xbox to a 2011 iMac as the thunderbolt port won't allow it. There are probably some devices that claim can do this via an adapter but I really don't think they do.
 
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See i didn't really want to use Windows 7, otherwise i would use a PC, thinking about it now, i'm not so sure if it would be totally worth it, i may just upgrade my PC, because i have 3 hard drives most nearly full, and looking at options for external hard drives such as Drobo etc, they just look really slow.

And when i mean't connect my Xbox 360 to it, meaning use the iMac as a monitor for it.

What would you be looking to use the Mac for in the first place? If it would be a general use/work machine, but you already have a display and everything you like, you can either Hackintosh (won't discuss here, and not completely recommended) or buy a Mac mini (good option). This said, it's an awful lot of money for a second system that nobody ultimately "needs", just "wants".
 
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