Hello!

After nursing and rebuilding an 8 year old PC (Ive upgraded the motherboard/processor twice, the power supply three times, hard drives many times) I'm finally gonna byte the bullet and replace it. I have no qualms about building a PC from parts. I want a small as possible foot print - I will put all the storage (save the boot drive) in an external cabinet probably via eSATA. It will be used almost entirely for astronomy. It wont be controlling the telescope, but everything else astronomical will occur on it. All my non-astronomical stuff is done on a Mac, which I will also be replacing. I considered buying an iMac and running either Parallels or Fusion VM, but have read to many horror stories about them. Bootcamp is not an option 'cause I'd like too have both OS X and Windows 7 running at the same time. (Has anyone gone the route of Parallels or Fusion?) So I'll probably get an other Mac mini and an equivalent Windows computer. I Own Windows 7 Ultimate so don't particularly need another copy of Win7.

Thanks, George

P.s My astronomical software is pretty much CCDStack, AIP4Win, Dplot and Photoshop