04 February 2007
My Parallels Universe
Installed Parallels Desktop on the MacBook Pro yesterday. Only good things to report. The performance of Windows applications is sufficiently fast that I'll lose the Windows partition I was using with BootCamp.
Why? Why mess with Windows on a Mac OS? Because (1) there are still Mac apps that don't have Intel-based executables, like Photoshop Elements (of which I'm running an ancient version), and (2) there are still apps for which the Mac version sucks or for which converting to the Mac app involves waaaaaaay too much overhead, like Quicken. Booting to Windows to run Photoshop Elements was a pain in the ass, and running my old TP-22 to do Quicken was a pain in the ass. Now it's all local to the one box.
I can't quite lose my Windows desktop machine at work: there are too many Windows network applications we use at school, and they're only accessible using Novell. I'd just about rather die than install intrusive invasive Novell on my laptop, even under Windows, so I'll live with dual hardware in that department for a while.
With Parallels Desktop installed, I can also play with various Linuxes on this same chunk of silicon. Very convenient. Again, the performance hit seems completely acceptable, given the abundance of processing power the Intel Macs have.
Update: Spoke too soon. Looks like I need to keep the BootCamp partition after all. Parallels yielded BSOD when trying to format USB drives. Hey, no problem. (An upside to using Parallels is that there's enough OS X intervention such that the hardware setting re: mouse operations work in Windows, unlike when the MacBook Pro boots Windows using BootCamp.)
Why? Why mess with Windows on a Mac OS? Because (1) there are still Mac apps that don't have Intel-based executables, like Photoshop Elements (of which I'm running an ancient version), and (2) there are still apps for which the Mac version sucks or for which converting to the Mac app involves waaaaaaay too much overhead, like Quicken. Booting to Windows to run Photoshop Elements was a pain in the ass, and running my old TP-22 to do Quicken was a pain in the ass. Now it's all local to the one box.
I can't quite lose my Windows desktop machine at work: there are too many Windows network applications we use at school, and they're only accessible using Novell. I'd just about rather die than install intrusive invasive Novell on my laptop, even under Windows, so I'll live with dual hardware in that department for a while.
With Parallels Desktop installed, I can also play with various Linuxes on this same chunk of silicon. Very convenient. Again, the performance hit seems completely acceptable, given the abundance of processing power the Intel Macs have.
Update: Spoke too soon. Looks like I need to keep the BootCamp partition after all. Parallels yielded BSOD when trying to format USB drives. Hey, no problem. (An upside to using Parallels is that there's enough OS X intervention such that the hardware setting re: mouse operations work in Windows, unlike when the MacBook Pro boots Windows using BootCamp.)
Labels: os x, parallels, windows
