Buying an Apple iMac or MacBook doesn’t need to be all about style over substance, which is the argument most PC users will offer when they discuss any new Mac and the operating system. There are always going to be scenarios where you might need to use Windows – for instance, testing software for this downloads site is a good example. However, the new Intel-based Macs are, effectively, PC architecture, so you’re now able to install and run Windows on these machines, natively. Pick up the OEM edition of Windows Vista and you can have a cool notebook and Vista installed, for less than you think.

The snag is, if you want to work between OS X and Vista, you won’t be able to write to your Windows partition. You can read, but not write. This is particularly frustrating if you want to copy files to your Windows drive, when working in OS X. You can’t access your Mac drive from Windows, unless you use something like MacDrive.

There is a solution. Paragon’s NTFS for Mac is a plugin for the OS X architecture that will enable you to read and write to your Windows-based partition or any Windows-formatted drive, including external drives. It’s really simple to use and, once installed, you don’t need to do anything. Your Windows partitions and drives simply open as any standard drive.