soundingblue

First time using a tripod.

After yesterday’s Boot Camp excitement, I tried installing Parallela Workstation today. This will also allow me to install Windows on an Intel Mac, but instead of having to reboot into Windows, Parallels Workstation works just like VirtualPC, you run Windows within a virtual machine environment from within OS X.

The advantage over the solution offered by Apple? No need to reboot your system. This will be handy if I want to fire up Windows just to run a quick application or to lodge my tax returns. Parallels Workstation also supports other flavour of Windows and Linux.

Since it runs in a virtual environment from within OS X, the performance is far from running Windows natively on the machine using Apple’s solution. However, the performance is still very good. On a dual core Intel iMac 1.83Ghz with 512 MB of RAM, Windows XP is still very usable. I have not installed any programs so far, but general OS navigation, opening files and web browsing using Internet Explorer have been very pleasant so far.

Apple announces Boot Camp today. Now booting into WinXP on an Intel Mac is possible and officially sanctioned by Apple. Smart move this one. With the possibility of booting into Windows, Apple’s hardware sales will just sky rocket.

The guys here at work were excited. We started installing WinXP using Boot Camp on 17″ Intel iMac with a 1.83 Ghz processor and 512 MB of RAM. The installation process was very painless. This Mac is fresh out of the box, so we updated it to 10.4.6, downloaded Boot Camp and followed the instructions in the readme. About less than An hour later, WinXP was booting up. I timed it and from the moment of the Mac start-up chime to the Windows desktop appearing, it took 45 secs. The first thing we installed? An anti-virus.

I found this somewhere but can’t remember the source. This allows you to do a software update via Terminal. The plus? No more windows prompting you to restart your Mac.

sudo softwareupdate -i -a

If you’re interested in purchasing cheaper Mac applications, macZOT is the way to go. They team up with developers of Mac applications and offer them at a discount on their site. I’m linking to this site because for every blog that links to them, the developers of AppZapper will bring down the price by $0.05. Hopefully, I can score one for free!