the air

Earlier last year, in May, I decided to leave the Windows mother-ship and join the party in MacLand. Although the transition was virtually pain-free and did not interrupt my day to day activities, I realized that there was a need to continue to maintain a Windows machine nearby. Certain software, such as Arena, do not have Mac OS versions. Such software is sometimes required for college students, so it makes sense to have a Windows-based PC or access to a Windows machine. For a time, I did have an old Dell laptop that I used specifically for Arena. However, it really is a pain in the ass to deal with two machines.

Now that a new semester is about to start, luck has it, the old Dell laptop finally decided to call it quits and pass away. I tried to resuscitate it, and I was partially successful. Unfortunately, I could not get the wireless internet to operate. So I was at a dilemma, either find another laptop or attempt to use virtualization software. After doing some light investigation, I came across this software, Parallels, which allows Mac users to run Windows XP or Vista simultaneously with OS X.

Boot Camp, a software included with Leopard, allows you to install and boot into Windows when your Mac machine starts up. Here’s the problem I have with dual booting my machine; if I need to use Microsoft Word while working on an Arena file, I have to have Word for Windows installed along with Word for Mac. Now I’m just wasting hard drive space for two of the same applications for different systems. With Parallels, I can run Arena with Windows running along with Leopard. Now I don’t need multiple versions of the same application installed. However, there is a need to remember one key thing with any virtualization software that can run Windows: You need to have an anti-virus application installed.

The main thing to remember with Parallels is:

1. plenty of ram (I have 2 GB)
2. plenty of free hard drive space (I had 42 GB free)
3. install anti-virus application (I used Avira Anti-vir)
4. practice good habits

Good Practices and Good Lives

So what do I mean by good practices?

• Do not install any application that has a mac version available
• Windows is a Guest OS, which means that it probably won’t be as fast if it were installed natively
• Do as much work as you can on OS X and just the bare minimum using Parallel

Parallels is quite fast and setup is a breeze. The key thing to remember is that Parallels could and probably will slow your machine down. Parallels is a great way to have a machine that can operate Windows along with OS X simultaneously. However, I do not think that Parallels is a great solution for gaming or CPU intensive applications such as Adobe CS suites, graphic & video animation/rendering.

Great For College Student?

If you are a college student and a Mac user, I would highly recommend using Parallels. It comes in two versions, Regular or Premium for $79 or $99 respectively. I’m not sure if they offer educational discounts for students, but it is definitely worth asking them. I bought the $99 version and it was practically free for me since I had enough Apple store gift cards. It is definitely not cheap and I’m not very thrilled either because I’m a huge supporter of free software. However, if you need Windows (and many college students will), this is a small investment to make. Try it out and see how you like it. There is also VMware Fusion, which I did not use because I saw Parallels in action and I was inclined to use that instead. Let me know how they both work out for you if you do try it. I’d like to also hear your thoughts and experiences as well.

No Comments » | Random Post