In Praise of the Apple Mac - Part 2
For a nervous Windows user considering whether to buy an Apple Mac for the first time, the knowledge that the Mac can run Windows is the biggest comfort of all. If all else fails and Apple’s Unix-based OS/X operating system proves to be impossible to live with, the beautiful hardware can be made to run Windows. It was certainly this knowledge that clinched my own decision, even though now, after 6 months with the Mac, I wouldn’t even contemplate going back to Windows.
The Mac can run Windows in one of two ways:
Firstly the Leopard operating system provides a utility call Boot Camp which allows the user to create a Windows partition on the Mac’s hard drive and at start-up choose whether to boot the Mac with Leopard or Windows. This way the Mac runs Windows natively so that Windows has access to all the Mac’s CPU and memory, the drawback being being that you must reboot to switch between Leopard and Windows. I believe that if you format the Windows partition as FAT32 you can read and write Windows files while running Leopard whereas if formatted as NTFS this will not be possible. Despite planning to use this Boot Camp facility before I bought the Mac I haven’t ever bothered to set it up, instead opting for virtualisation.
Secondly you can run PC emulation software under the Leopard operating system. I am aware of two main software products in this arena, Parallels (www.parallels.com) and VMWare Fusion (www.vmware.com). Both have good reviews and are reasonably cheap (as I type this Fusion is available for download for £43.99 or US $79.99). I opted for Fusion and have no regrets. I have set up two virtual machines, installed Windows XP Pro on one and Windows Vista Ultimate on the other. The setup process is simple and Fusion makes all resources of the Mac hardware available to Windows such as the built-in microphone, the speakers, the optical drive, the USB ports, as well of course as the screen and keyboard. You can run Windows in full-screen mode, in a Window on the Leopard desktop, or even run a single Windows application from the Leopard ‘dock’ as if it was a Mac application. Very clever. While the virtual PC is running it appears to the Mac as another networked device so files can easily be copied between the two computers. There is of course an overhead with this approach; using virtualisation some of the Mac’s resources are devoted not to Windows but to the emulation software and to the Leopard OS as well. Nevertheless with the Mac’s 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor it runs as a perfectly usable Windows PC on which I can happily run Visual Studio 2005.