Mac OS XP
Now it’s been more than a month that my new MacBook arrived — and I’m still impressed: The display is great, the batteries are really powerful, it’s one of the most quiet notebooks I’ve ever used and it’s extremely fast. But beside the performance boost switching to Intel based CPUs had another big advantage — it’s now quite easy to get a copy of Windows running on your Mac.
So why would someone consider installing Windows on a Mac? Well maybe you are a project manager heavily relying on Microsoft Project, maybe you are gamer or maybe your life is all about web design and you have to test your site on different platforms and browsers. I’m sure that I left out a bunch of additional usecases — but those were the ones that immediately came to my mind.
Dual boot or virtualization
On a Mac you basically have two options how to install Windows: Dual boot or virtualization. Both have their advantages. For example if you wanna make use of the full power of your Core Duo, that’s most likely when you want to play Windows games on your Mac, you should consider the dual boot solution. So Boot Camp is the way to go.
Personally I don’t like the dual boot option since I don’t use my MacBook for gaming — the XBox 360 is the gaming platform of my choice :) The only Windows application that I really “need” is Internet Explorer for testing web sites. And rebooting each time I wanna check how IE interprets a recently made change to a CSS file ist definitely not acceptable.
Parallels
Up till now I had a second PC for testing purposes — however that was also kinda annoying. So I decided to take a look at Parallels and install Windows in a virtualization mode on my MacBook. For those of you who don’t know Parallels — it’s more or less VMware that is capable of running on a Mac :)
Anyway so I downloaded Parallels and installed a copy of Windows XP. The installation process took about the same time as on a normal PC — so after about half an hour Windows was up and running. The first thing I was really impressed of is the fact that the network respectively the internet connection just worked. I didn’t have to configure anything. Also the trackpad with its scrolling and right-click functionality worked perfectly. Great.
Performance
Another fascinating aspect is the over-all performance. Maybe it’s just the power of the Core Duo processor, maybe it’s the fact that my MacBook has 2GB of RAM or most likely a combination of both… anyway you can work smoothly with both operating systems.
Ease of use
Due to the limited screen size of my MacBook I prefer working in full-screen mode, which is of course part of Parallels’ feature set. Also switching between the two worlds is kinda nice since the same cubic effect as for fast user switching is used. However I prefer to work with it just as with any other application — meaning just hiding it via Cmd+H and restoring it by clicking the dock icon or via Cmd+Tab. It’s as easy as that :) If you are interested, I’ve taken some screenshots of the installation process.
The only downside I experienced so far is that I could not figure out how to write a simple @ or a backslash on my German keyboard. So your help would be really appreciated :)
Update: So for all those of you experiencing the same issues: in order to get an @ just hit ctrl+alt+q, for a backslash ctrl+alt+ß. And don’t forget to install the Parallels tools for some nice features and smoother cursor movement.
