Interestingly, just yesterday I posted a list of Six and Three-Quarters Ways to Run Windows on a Mac. The choices are even more dizzying than it appears. Boot Camp, Parallels, Fusion, and CrossOver are of course all on the list — and then some!

Well, this ended up being a great subject for The Tech Night Owl LIVE, so we invited Joe to talk about this and other subjects on our March 1 episode. Don’t miss it!

Peace,
Gene

Interestingly, just yesterday I posted a list of Six and Three-Quarters Ways to Run Windows on a Mac. The choices are even more dizzying than it appears. Boot Camp, Parallels, Fusion, and CrossOver are of course all on the list — and then some!

There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons to run Windows on your Mac, and the fact that most o them are games doesn’t make them any less important. Until all games are released on both platforms, there will be a need to run Windows natively, in supported API or in fast-enough virtualization on the Mac.

This is not new. I played Age of Empires under Virtual PC with pretty good results, and there are times when even plain, ordinary Windows solitaire is just what I want to do.

Remember when Apple had a co-computer card for the Quadra 610 and possibly other computers? It was a 486 on a card that used the “Processor Direct Slot”. It never was much to write home about but it was what it was. A sepereate computer inside. Well Apple had a way to switch to that environment while still running the Mac side of things. Why can’t Apple do that now? Dedicate some RAM that the OS X kernel can’t touch (because of the “Dual Boot” preference) and a partition that is exclusive to each environment for write abilities. It’s not even a virtualization thing. It’d be a matter of Apple coding a keyboard command or program to switch environments.
I mean honestly would you care if the Mac side of things halted while you were in windows? That’s what happens when you reboot completely into windows. Basically instead of having to reboot the entire machine, the environment would simply halt while you switched to the other side. And there are a number of products on the market that allow you to read and write Mac or Windows volumes for both platforms.
My point is I think Apple can get the hardware to play nice enough to switch environments without having to reboot.
I can dream at least.
Ian

Sometimes, all you need is one good reason to use a program. As a web designer, for years I struggled with simply reviewing my web design work in MicroSoft’s Explorer. Of all the browsers out there, Explorer on Windows was (is) the worst, but the one nearly everyone uses. I had no choice but to test in it…and sometimes I couldn’t. Since I design on a Mac and Explorer for the Mac ceased support at version five, I was stuck unless I invested in Virtual PC – yuck.

Enter the intel processor switch and Parrallels. Yes, I had to purchase two software programs just to look at my client web sites in Windows Explorer, but it has changed everything for me and my business. Now, I can design all my web sites on the Mac and make certain they test out in both operating systems, on every browser – thank you technology!

Very well put. I have not needed Windows in my life for many years now. I have parallels installed on my computer and windows in it, but I have not used it yet. There is a Mac application for what many think is a windows only application. On Mac, it will have a different name ad in many ways, an easier and nicer interface to deal with. So good thinking. Don’t hurry and buy Windows because some people say “There are so many programs out there for Windows and not Mac”. What they forget to mention is Windows is so stripped of an OS (Compared to OS X) that you need all these programs to run remotely as good as a Mac with less software purchased for the Mac.

When I bought my Mac Pro I got a copy of Parallels Desktop thrown in free by the vendor, so I said what the heck and installed it. And now every time I get the thought that I ought to spring for a copy of Windows and install it, I immediatley have a second thought — what the heck for? I admit this may be a fault of my own. Maybe there’s a lot of terrific PC software out there that would make my work easier and my life richer. Maybe I’m just ignorant, but I need somebody to give me a good reason to plunk down for Windows. So far I can’t think of any.