The ads are everywhere these days – switch to the Mac for a safer, more stable computing experience. Many people have taken the plunge; some people have done so due to Vista frustrations while others have done so based on promises of less frustrating computer time. Personally, I use both a Mac (a MacBook laptop) and two Windows desktops (both Dell Precision workstations – one at home and one at the office. I will admit that I’m much more inclined to use Windows and started using the MacBook a few months ago in order to better familiarize myself with the platform. About twenty of our sixty or so faculty at Westminster College use Macintosh computers so my staff and I need to get up to speed. So, I decided to lead my example and at least start to incorporate Mac OS X into my daily routine; believe it or not, I do use my MacBook at some point every single day, so I am getting a workout.
However, even when I’m in “Mac mode†I need Windows tools from time to time. For example, my VPN client is currently Windows-only, so when I need to connect to the office, I need Windows. I could get a Mac client, but haven’t done so yet. Further, most of the technical writing that I do is Windows in nature, so having a portable Windows platform is pretty important to allowing me to stay current on writing projects from wherever I happen to find myself.
These days, I can take both my Mac and Windows laptops with me and still take only a single laptop on the road. There are two main products on the market that enable simultaneous Mac OS X and Windows programs to run at the same time on a Mac – VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac. While both are fine products, I’ve been using VMware products for years on the Windows side, so I stuck with them to meet my Mac/Windows hybrid needs. That is the product that I’ll focus on in this writing, but I encourage you to give the Parallels product a close looks, too.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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Another product to consider
Another product to consider for virtualization is Sun's VirtualBox; it's open source (hence free)http://www.virtualbox.org/
Parallels Desktop 4.0
Using Parallels 4.0 I run XP Pro. It runs better on my MacBook Pro than any PC I have owned.Regards
R
VirtualBox
I didn't know that VirtualBox supported OS X as a host. Great tip! Learn something new every day.Scott