i am thinking of changing my old windows pc for a new imac running snow leopard 10.6 next month. I see that most all of these programs have mac versions. over the years i have saved loads of figures and props on to the hard drive and and on to cds.

Will the vast majority of these work on the new mac computer once the mac versions of the programs have been installed.??

If they do not work would i be advised to use  ?? boot camp and buy a copy of windows xp and install that on the mac and just use the pc versions of the programs.
Not knowing my way around a mac yet would this be a difficult task and would it slow down the performance of the machine significantly.
thanks
geoff

All your props and models will work on the Mac as long as you have the application to open them. I develop on the Mac with DAZ Studio, Poser, Blender, ZBrush and sell here and I havent's received one single complaint about opening my content on a PC. The formats are completely platform independent.
Don't hesitate asking questions here for anything Mac-related.
Welcome aboard!

 Save your runtime to a separate  external drive.
when you install to the mac copy your runtime to 
the proper directory whether its DAZ/Studio/content
or Poser/ You can also go back to your daz accounts
and switch your download preference to mac and
re-download everything.
top is faster

thanks for the reasuring advise that the models and props should work.
I would be grateful if one further question could be answered however.

when i get the new imac should i install the programs and a copy of xp via boot camp that comes with the mac ? or should i purchase a copy of parallels so i do not have to dual boot ?and can according to parallels blurb work seemlessly between windows and the mac os

many thanks

                             Geoff

Why do you want to install the Windows copy of the programs? They work just fine with the Mac version. I have not used either BootCamp or Parallels, although I own the latter. Just install the programs in the default location, /Applications, and then install the content in a separate folder. What I do, I created a DSContent folder in my Home dir and then create a new folder for each product in it and install the product there. There are a couple of exceptions like G4 adn A4, which need to be installed in the same folder where V4 is.
But, If I had to run XP programs I would use Parallels simply because rebooting the machine is a hassle and when you do that you lose the ability to work with the Mac programs. Just MHO.

I have VMWare for the Mac and I use Boot Camp. neither of these applications comes with Windows, and VMWare is not really "seamless" If you have a license and a CD of windows XP SP2 or Vista you can install in on the Mac.

If you use Boot Camp you can not copy from one drive to another, you can however copy to a jump drive or USB drive, burn a CD, ect. and bring it back between the Mac OS and Windows.

VMWare will let you copy between desktops but the Mac runs slower as it's running two OS's at the same time.

I have VMWare booting to my Boot Camp partition, but I have run into issues with the drivers for the video that I don't have when I boot into windows with Boot Camp.

*Why would you run windows on a Mac? *
There are software packages I use for both 3D and 2D that do not exist for the Mac.

.exe installers wont run on the mac.

If you're running an Intel Mac and you use a program that was not compiled for universal it and you have the PC version it will run faster on the PC version (i.e. Adobe Creative Suite 2) you may only run into this on legacy software but it occasionally happens.

You can rub it in your friends faces that your Mac will run circles around their Dell's and HP's running Windows and in addition to Windows you actually have a real OS that was not designed by a bunch of programmers hamfisting (Man, I gotta' use that word more often!) what Apple had elegantly perfected..

You want to have a partition on your mac that can get wiped out by a Virus but will not affect your Mac partition. (Yes, Mac's running windows are susceptible to virus on the windows partition, run AVGFree)

-K (aka Sorshadragon)

Thanks for your very insightful advice. On reflection now i think when i do get a imac in a few weeks time i will not be installing windows on the mac, but leave the harddrive as a pure mac drive.

Check out my sig and you will see my current Mac specs. Here is some important tips -

First, make sure to get a LOT of RAM. New versions of Poser and other software will take advantage of more than 4GB, especially since they are moving eventually to 64 bit versions.

Second, do NOT ever run a VM machine to run Windows programs with that are as intensive as 3D applications like Poser. They are best suited for basic use like word processors, a camera or remote control application or generic non intensive use.

Third, if you want to install Windows, do so via Boot Camp only so you can run native with no slow down at all. Since you are going with an iMac, you will have to put it on your single internal drive. If you had a Mac Pro, you can easily setup dedicated hard drives for each OS you want to boot to on startup. I have a dedicated drive for each OS of: Leopard, Snow Leopard and Windows 7.

Fourth, don't skimp on the video card either no matter what model you go with. Get the best one they offer if you are doing 3D.

Keep in mind there is NO difference as far as a Mac or PC is concerned in terms of file formats that are application specific such as Poser, Daz, etc. They are in a format designed to be opened by that program regardless of the OS you are running. I wish others in the market place here would understand this and not confuse people.

Good luck in your shopping.

many thanks for sharing your experiance of macs. In view of this i have decided not to go for the model with the intergrated nvidia geforce 9400 graphics but to go for the imac 24inch with 2.93ghz , 4 gig of memory and the the  dedicated  nvidia geforce gt120 with 256 mb of memory.

This will bump up the price by £300 and mean i have to save up my money for a few more weeks but in the long term should be a better investment and give more satisfaction.