Just bought my first Mac!

[bobbarley]

On the Mac now.  First impressions... AWESOME 

[bobbarley]

Well Lion is about to come off and be replaced by Snow Leopard!

[Jay]

Which should then be replaced by Windoze 

[bobbarley]

This Mac ain't powerful enough to run Lion.  Lion needs 2GB minimum, plus preferably an i3 or better processor.  Once I've got two or more applications open with Lion the machine is really struggling, I get messages saying the machine is sluggish to respond!

Downgrading one OS down should hopefully make a difference.  The spec's for SL are only a dual core CPU and 1GB RAM 

I want to put W7 on, but again I don't think the machine will handle it.  I might try popping Windows XP onto it?

[Jay]

It'll cope with W7 32bit, W7 is pretty good on resources and ran on my now 6 year old PC with 1Gb ram well enough, it comes with Media centre which is good, get a USB DVR stick if you want to record, otherwise play your normal media through it

If you don't like Media centre, there is XBMC or Boxee to play with too, not experimented with other media centres.

Just throwing some of the media centre goodness options out there for you to have a play and find one which suits you

[Kerrse]

If you want windows buy a windows machine  I'm sure it will be fine with snow leopard 

[bobbarley]

Snow Leopard is doing very nicely, I've nearly half a gig of extra memory to play with now.  When I switch applications they're actually instant.  I hate to downgrade, but in this instance it was a necessity.

I've got one or two applications that aren't compatible with Mac, is there any way I can install them in OS X without having to dual boot?

[Jay]

Parallels or Virtual box to run a virtual Windows machine, but expect a slow down when running it (especially with Parallels).

[Kerrse]

Snow Leopard is doing very nicely, I've nearly half a gig of extra memory to play with now.  When I switch applications they're actually instant.  I hate to downgrade, but in this instance it was a necessity.

I've got one or two applications that aren't compatible with Mac, is there any way I can install them in OS X without having to dual boot?

To be honest I have now come to the conclusion I preferred snow leopard but going to up my ram to 8 or possibly 16 gb hopefully that will stop any annoying lag on Lion

[bobbarley]

Wish I could mate, this machine is already maxed out at 2GB though. My PC has 8GB!!

Jay, I just tried Virtual Box and when booting the Windows disc I get unexpected errors and it closes down.  Might give Parallels a try instead.