New VDP Workstation

[AlexPetersen]

My company is looking to expand our capabilities to VDP on our xerox 800. This mainly will be mail merge and the like. We're looking to invest in a new dedicated workstation for all the xerox's prepress and VDP prep work. Many at the company think that a windows workstation would be a better investment over all with the kinds of files and software that is available exclusively for Windows.

Personally I would much prefer a MAC workstation, for its versatility and well, I'll have to use it everyday, for prepress, VDP preflighting and typesetting. If some software is exclusively available for windows, I'd much rather boot into bootcamp and handle it from there, rather than having a dedicated windows workstation.

Do you guy's have any preferences in this regard? Software availability/ compatibility (xerox is running Friery btw) between windows and MAC? Or am I just over thinking this?

[Joe Duffy]

If you get a Mac, you can run windows. Best of both worlds.

[DCurry]

I would rather use Fusion or Parallels to run Wind0ws, rather than Bootcamp. That way you don't need to reboot your Mac.

[AlexPetersen]

True point. I don't have much experience running parallels, does it work well for you?

[Shawnd]

Always been a windows shop here, when I had to upgrade the VDP workstation last year I looked at building my own box but with with a custom build from ibuypower, I couldn't build it for cheaper than what I got from them on special. SSD drives with Win7 64bit with 8 gigs of memory to output to our xerox 700 with fiery, been working good so far.