Running Windows on a Mac
 

Trying to figure out if I should buy another PC or put Parallels or something on an iMac.

Anyone running Windows on a Mac?

I'm not sure I understand your question entirely but I run two Windows VM's on top of my Macbook Pro with Fusion. So if I want to launch a Windows app it boots the VM and runs it from fusion.

Yes, I want to run Windows 7 and MSAccess on a Mac. QuickBooks too.

I haven't done it, but...

Where I work a guy came in to do some training. He was using a Macbook Air 13". I was asking him about it because I was curious about the Mac stuff for the missus. He said that he had only booted into OSX once the day he bought it, and had been booting it into Windows since. He had no problems and thought that it ran great. He had his set up as a dual boot system.

So

external hard drive set up as "bootable" with win OS installed then simply plug it in and restart computer and hold option at start up

If you want to keep MacOS then this. Fusion is inexpensive and you can can create all the WinXP/7 images you like.

Vmware Fusion. Simple to use and get virtual machines running. I would not recommend running from an external drive/device, but that's just me. You'll want to make sure you have enough systems resources so the Windows virtual machine will perform. Probably 4GB physical memory would do it.

Shaun,

All my Macs run VMwares Fusion.

30 day free trial of Fusion.
http://www.vmware.com/go/try-fusion-en

If you don't need something fancy and want to go for a test drive you can also use Virtual Box from Oracle.

It's totally free forever. I use it as well.

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.18/VirtualBox-4.3.18-96516-OSX.dmg

You can actually import your current PC's hard drive as a virtual drive. You can also create the virtual drive from a Windows recovery partition.

Good little write up, Convert & Use Your Physical Machine In VMware, VirtualBox & Virtual PC

One of the things that is interesting about Fusion is you can run your PC apps as separate "apps" in the OS X environment. Meaning you don't see any of the Windows GUI, they appear like any other native OS X app.

If you plan to run this on a MacBook you may want to take the money that you would have sent on a new PC and max out the RAM and upgrade to a 7,200 RPM HD.

My current daily carry MacBook Pro has 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB 7,200 RPM drive and there is zero performance hit from virtualization.

Oh, and the benefit to Virtual Machines, build the first disc image, share a folder on the OS X side with your Virtual Machine, you can save all your data there. Then make a copy of it, set it aside as a fresh install backup.

If your VM gets royally borked toss it, make a copy of the 1st one again and all since all your data is on the OSX side of things it's "protected".

Parallels works fine. I use it on my MacBook Pro to run pretty heavy duty stuff like Revit, primavera, etc. that there just (unfortunately) isn't a Mac version of yet.

Parallels is better than Fusion. I own both and find Parallels to be faster and easier to deal with.

A dual boot setup is better in many ways, but it depends on how you plan on using Windows. If you provide more details regarding how you plan on using Windows, it would help with that recommendation.

I use Parallels to run Windows 8. We have a few applications we need at work that are Windows only. Generally it works fine but we noticed a few quirks with some web based software - in our case it's an Oracle system using Internet Explorer. Nothing that stops us getting the work done though.

We have also had issues using Excel within the Windows environment. It seems that we dwell a little outside of the '98%' compatible zone....

If we were running only Windows software I'd get PC's, but we aren't so I have the luxury of going to iMacs. Makes IT support so much easier in our small workplace.

Cant you just use Boot Camp? What do the products like Parallels give you that Boot Camp doesnt? Noob questions, sorry.

Im all Apple at home now after my 12 year old PC finally wasnt worth fixing again. But Id like to run some Win programs occasionally. I was just looking at the details of doing the dual-boot thing. I am very disappointed to see you cant get a "official" copy of Win 7 for much less than the latest Win 8.1 (which I refuse to install).

I think with boot camp you get a "choose your os" on startup and if you want to switch you need to reboot. With parallels the system runs Mac OS X and has one or more instances of windows running inside that. I can do all my Mac stuff right next to my "windows only" stuff with no rebooting required.

Thanks everyone for the input. I think I'll just get another iMac and make it a dedicated Windows machine in the end. Was thinking of using my assistant's iMac but talking it over, we decided it's not practical enough to make it worthwhile.

The other option is I get a new tower Mac and then use Parallels or VM.

I am not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, but the only Windows applications I needed on my MacBook Pro was MS Office for Mac.

It works great, no interface issues at all with all the microsoft machines at the office.

Good luck.

Thanks Paul. I can buy a Mac version of QuickBooks but I need a windows machine for our custom MS Access order entry and invoicing system. There is no Mac version of Access. We built it ourselves, probably should have used Filemaker Pro, but I like visual basic and SQL.

Depending on the iMac it should have plenty of grunt for Virtualization. Add a second monitor to it and you can run Windows and OSX full screen, one on each monitor.

I do that on one of my boxes.

FWIW Virtualization works in combo with boot camp.

Meaning you set up boot camp as normal then tell your VM app to build a machine using the boot camp partition.

This way you have access to the dual boot windows partition without having to reboot into Windows and if you ever find a need to boot full Windows everything is synced.

Virtual Machines are a great technology. Been using them for 15 years. Makes it so simple to develop and evaluate different versions of an OS and specific appliances.

The other convenient thing is the availability of prebuilt appliances. Say you decide you need a CRM. You could go research the ones you are considering then set up a computer for one, install the CRM and waste a day configuring everything or you can go to VMware, browse their pre built appliances, download the ones you want to try and simply start them up. They come prebuilt with everything ready to go.

I use Fusion on my MacBook Air to run my company's server software for demos and whatnot. Virtualization is super cool for this, because I can just copy the VM files from a server instance at the office, drop it in Fusion on my MacBook, and hit the road totally self-contained.

You can even put the VM files on a USB thumb drive or small portable hard drive, and it will be accessible from any machine in the world having a VMware app such as Fusion.

Wanted to update this with about a month of experience using Parallels & Windows 7 in my 2010 MacBook Pro.

Net-net, wish I had done this sooner. I am running both PC Quickbooks and our custom Access app and to their actual running, have had no bugs or problems. But it hasn't been perfect. I'm not sure what triggers it, but there are times when my computer is dog slow and it doesn't seem to be related to number of programs open or RAM usage, of which I have 8GB. I think something else triggers it, it unfortunately seems random.

Most of the time, everything is running well and it's extremely helpful to be able to work in the PC Access app and Mac Excel, copying and pasting between the two.

How does Parallels differ from VMWare?

Next step is to get a maxed out iMac with flash drive, Christmas is around the corner and it should last me at least 4 years.