New to mac lol HELP ME

[BUNDY]

im looking at buying a mac to do all the graphic design on for my small business umm what would i be looking at to run corel (if it has a mac ver) and the whole adobe suite (illustartor, photoshop) i was thinking a 2ghz system with 1gb ram and OS X but one of my employees recons that each os is made to suit the mac its bundled with and that you cant do any hardware upgrades. im very confised so if someone could help me out PLZ i would greatly appreciate it

[mmkerc]

Any of the Macs can do what you want. Without knowing your budget its tough to recommend a particular configuration. That being said the new Mac Pro is highly customizible. I would bump up the ram to at least 2 Gb, more if you can afford it based on your graphics needs.

REgarding the OS, when you buy a Mac it comes with the latest OS installed (right now it 10.4 aka Tiger). That OS with your computer is model specific (i.e. if you buy an iMac the OS on the iMac can be loaded on another iMac with out problems, but if you try and load it on a laptop, or Power Mac you may have problems.) If you buy a retail version of the OS, it can be loaded on any Mac.

[BUNDY]

thanx mate umm i was thinking of buying a half decent mac 1.5ghz - 2ghz and bump the ram up to at least 1gb and put a bigger hdd in it as i only have a limited budget at the moment

btw can i get a mac to talk to a win2003 server for files and stuff

ohh also if i created a file in photoshop on a PC could the mac still open it and vice versa

[Solitare]

I'm presently running a 1.6 Ghz Mac Mini, with 2GB of ram stuffed into it, and it seems snappy enough to handle most graphic jobs that I've thrown at it. It's hooked up via a USB type KVM switch, so I can share a monitor and a USB mouse & keyboard between it and a PC without any problems.

Networking shouldn't pose too much of a problem (doing it is still on my 'to do' list) - the 'worst case' scenario would be e-mailing files between the computers (ie - e-mail from your PC address to an address you set up for your Mac) E-Mails have a 10 mb file capacity though. Sharing CDs & USB memory keys between a PC & Mac shouldn't pose a problem either.

You shouldn't have any problems sharing files between your Photoshop in the PC and the Photoshop in Mac - it's pretty seamless (altho I find there are always font issues when transfering files from one machine to another) Only a few PC files, like MS Publisher constantly refuse to open on a Mac.

[mmkerc]

As indicated before, and backed up by Solitare any of the current Mac line can do the tasks you have identified. Realize also, that any of the new Macs are much better then half decent especially compared to budget offering in the windows world.

With a limited budget, I would upgrade ram 1st to at least 2GB, then look to get a larger hard drive. Look at the 1.83 iMac with 160gb hard drive to start should be enough for a while, or add an external 160HD to the mini for about $150.

Lastly, as Solitare said hooking up to a Windows network/server is not a problem, and most files transfer between systems without problems.