Running Windows on your Intel Mac
Note: This was entry was originally posted at our web site at www.mac-house-calls.com on August 6, 2006. At the time of the original posting running windows on your Mac was pretty much brand new. After re-reading this posting I decided the information on it is still largely relevant, so I'm using it to launch this blog. Follow-on posts will add more info shortly.
Hi, and Welcome to our inaugural blog entry. This Monday (Aug 7, 2006) Steve Jobs completed the transition of Macintosh to the Intel line of processors. The final entries are the Mac Pro, and the new XServe. These, finally replace the existing PowerMac G5, and G5 XServe respectively, thereby relegating the G4/G5 PowerMac computing platform to history. Wow!
We won't get into the tech specifics of the new Macs as this will be generously covered all over the internet already. Suffice it to say the processing capacity of the new machines is blistering!
The first intel based Mac Laptops were released last year. Seemingly as soon as the first laptops were on the street, intrepid souls sought to find a way to run Microsoft Windows XP on then. The very first attempts were met with resistance at Apple, but they quickly reversed their opposition with the release of BootCamp which adapts the EFI firmware on the Mac to allow booting into Windows XP.
In this hotsheet we'll share our experiences and observations setting up windows on a Mac. We've now setup a bunch of these, and even though I still don't like the Windows, it is BLAZING on a MacBook Pro.
There are two basic ways we're setting this up lately:
- with BootCamp,
- and using Parallels Desktop for Mac.
In both cases you need your legal copy of Windows XP (Home or Pro). With BootCamp there is no other cost. With Parallels, you have to spring for a copy of the software for $79.99.
BootCamp:
As we mentioned bootcamp allows you to restart with the Option key, and select a partition on your Hard Drive with Windows installed to boot from. Once your Mac boots into Windows it is really indistinguishable from any other PC running windows. There are some keyboard mapping issues, but frankly they are just cosmetic. Microsoft Windows Programs run at full speed, and are really, REALLY fast.
Out of the box there does not appear to be any way to access the files on the Mac partition of your hard drive directly, but installing "MacDrive" on Windows solves this handily. So, add another $49 to your budget, because this is pretty much essential.
Parallels:
Enter Parallels! This is a really cool technology. We got in on the beta some time ago, and I think we paid $39 to become a beta tester. Since then they've raised the price to $79. The Parallels software takes advantage of the built in virtualization capability on the new intel chips which in essence lets you turn one physical PC into several virtual systems, all running different applications and OSs. The Parallels Desktop software is the Mac OS X application that is used to setup and "tap into" the virtualization capability of the new Intel Macs.
This is pretty heady stuff, and it frankly simply was not available on the PowerMac based platform.
We've set Parallels up on several computers now, and frankly this is now our preferred way to setup Windows on Mac. The setup is a little cumbersome, but once its done it works really REALLY well! The Windows (guest) OS runs entirely inside a window on your Mac. Out of the box the interaction is clunky because you have to hold down control keys to release the mouse from Windows back to your Mac, but when you install the "Parallels Tools" that problem is solved, and the whole system works very seamlessly.
In the early versions of Parallels we noticed that performance was a little sluggish, and it also really slowed down the Mac. This appeared to be a problem with going into System Prefs directly from Parallels, rather than from the Finder. In the current version, Parallels gives you a warning when you try this, and effectively disallows it. You can switch between windowed mode to full screen mode, and the parallels software will fire up the fast user switching graphics effect to "cube" you over to Windows in full screen mode.
With "Tools" you can also set up your Macs hard drive to be shared with the virtual PC. On the PC side your Macs regular HD shows up in the Network Neighborhood. This means you don't need "MacDrive". This works well, but we still find it to be a little sluggish accessing the Mac files.
Beyond BootCamp and Parallels, WINE?
We've heard reports that Apple will NOT support virtualization in the upcoming version of its OS (10.5 Leopard). This seems unbelievable in the current climate of cooperation, and interoperability, but I guess I've seen weirder things, so we'll see.
Meanwhile, we're really excited about an open source technology that's been brewing for about a decade called WINE. I don't know what WINE stands for but you can bet it's WINdows something or other. Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. That's what Mac OS X is, a POSIX compatible operating system. DarWINE is the OS X port of WINE.
Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop. WINE does NOT require that you install Windows!!!!
This a technology we plan to start testing in depth soon, and will be the subject of another Hotsheet in the near future.
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