So have I coyote. The only thing I have not been able to figure out though is this: how do you convert an old Word Document to a newer version (so it is readable) or so you can open it on your newer Mac? I have older documents saved from way back when I was in H.S. and college that I still do care about but due to them being on that older version of Word that is not what I have on this computer I can not read them and can't open them up on this computer. If there is a certain program I need to get and put on the computer to be able to please let me know.

http://www.libreoffice.org/ free and runs on OSX, Windows and Linux. It generally does a pretty good job of reading word processing documents from other programs. There are also mac versions of firefox and google chrome browsers which I like to use. Googledocs and Microsoft office 365 should work in your browser too. You might, as a photographer, like to try a program called Darktable (www.darktable.org) also free and is very similar to lightroom.


Running Windows Software on a mac.

Virtualbox (which is free for personal use) is excellent software from oracle which allows you to create and run various operating systems within a virtual pc and even share files between the guest virtual machine and the host. If you select bridged mode for the virtual network card in virtualbox it will appear as a PC on your lan as well as your mac, this can be useful. The hard drive for a virtual pc is a large file on your mac's harddrive which grows as needed, as it is just a file it can be moved to an external hard drive. You would have to change the virtual machine settings to say where it is moved to.

You could even install Virtualbox on another PC and plug the external drive into that pc set that virtual machine to use the same hard drive file as you use on the mac and you would be able to use it just the same as if it was running on your mac host. Yes windows running within windows or Linux if you prefer (linux can boot from an external drive or a usb stick which gives you the possibility of having your virtual pc self contained in even just a thumb drive, just boot from usb).

With bootcamp you can install a windows install on a separate partition (subject to license restrictions of the windows disk). For most uses a virtual pc is good enough (slightly slower than a pc with the same cpu and you shouldn't allocate more than half your ram to the virtual pc).

Where boot camp would be useful is for PC Games as they will want direct access to your graphics card and audio hardware to run at their best. Technically you could run the PC version of Photoshop on it and it should perform as well as it would on an equivalent specified PC but it makes more sense to use the Mac to run that.

Disadvantages of dualbooting is that Windows would have to be allocated a slice of your hard drive effectively permanently. Windows isn't really able to read the hfs journaled file system which osx uses, although OSX can read the NTFS file system that Windows uses. This could be inconvenient if you need a file which is stored on the other OS.

So generally speaking if you need windows programs on your mac a virtual machine is the most useful way to go. It's worth noting that if you do create a virtual machine there are several options for the file format of the hard drive file. VMDK is a good choice as Paragon software have a free program which lets you mount vmdk files as a virtual hard drive on your mac.

Lets say your virtual machine has a file you need on the mac a photo maybe. With a Virtual machine you normally would have to boot it into windows and login before you could put it in a shared folder of copy and paste via the clipboard. With Paragons little utility you can click on the hard drive file and it becomes just another drive on your mac, no need to start the virtual machine and wait for it to boot.

While I have talked about virtualbox, parallels and vmware work just the same but you would need to pay for parallels and the commercial vmware workstation is really the equivalent of Virtualbox, although once you have setup a virtual machine in workstation the free vmware player is all that is needed to run the virtual machine. Vmware does have the possibility of running a virtual Mac on a PC but that is disabled by default.

One of the great things about computers today is open source software largely free (as in beer), They tend to have versions across platforms the one most commonly mentioned on this forum is the Gimp which is available on Linux, BSD, Windows and OSX for example. For OSX there are 2 main sources MacPorts and Brew (kind of like open source supermarkets but without checkouts) Here you can find programs for doing most things under one roof (ok 2) its always worth taking a look here to see if there is something available to do what you want.

I forgot about codeweavers crossoveroffice and wine
crossoveroffice is a commercial version of wine maintained by a company called codeweavers. Wine (which stands for wine is not an emulator) trys to provide a windows program with the resources it would normally get from the windows operating system a bit like an interpretor between a french man and and an englishman translating between the two languages (OSX and Windows) the simpler the conversation the less likely there is to be a misunderstanding sometimes the conversation goes smoothly other times there maybe some misunderstandings and other times its a non starter.

Codeweavers tend to concentrate on the most useful windows programs and may do better than wine at running the foreign windows program initially they concentrated on the biggie microsoft office hence crossoveroffice but they do a lot more than that.
Obviously if it works for the software you want to run its a lot less resource hungry than recreating a whole windows pc in software and you don't need a windows license to legally run it.

It can be useful, I'm using it now as it happens to run Sonys PC desktop reader software on a linux desktop. I'm authoring epubs for my sony reader and its easier to load an epub into the reader on my desktop than keep transferring the epub to my reader only to find an error in the css and have to edit it and repeat. Sonys ereader doesn't support all the layout code properly.