Steff.me

With my recent purchase of an iMac, I finally managed to dump my old ADVENT 3.2Ghz Pentium IV PC on my mum. She needed a new computer and was quite happy to have that one when I upgraded. Now, I’m not saying having only Macs is a bad thing, however my Computer Science course requires that I do a bit of Web Programming; that means, testing in all web browsers - especially Internet Explorer.

There are, really, only two options that I can see open to people who want to install or use Windows on a Mac and they are Parallels and Boot Camp.

For those who don’t know, Parallels allows Apple users the ability to run Windows alongside Mac OS X at the same time, in a virtual machine. Parallels claim to be fast and secure and to work with Intel-powered Macs including the iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook and the MacBook Pro. It’s not just Windows you can run, though. They have a wide support for multiple OS’s, from Linux to Vista. Parallels comes at a price of $79.99, which I’m seriously considering paying.

The current “free” alternative to this from Apple is Boot Camp. Boot Camp allows you to run Windows XP natively on your Mac machine. There are simple instructions included with the Boot Camp disc image, which make it nearly effortless to install Windows XP on any of the latest Intel-based Mac computers. You can find more information about Boot Camp at the link above. Just note that Boot Camp is a beta product and could be prone to problems like any beta software. There are also rumours around that Apple are going to charge a fee for Boot Camp, once the product reaches a completely stable and bug-free state. I just hope that it stays a rumour.

My Solution

The first thing I did was pick up a copy of Windows XP Pro (the version I have is completely legal, however I did not pay). I decided to opt for Boot Camp first, since I’m an avid gamer and it’s nice to have games run at full speed. After downloading the disc image, I installed the software and followed the instructions it gave. If you intend to install Boot Camp, you need a blank CD handy as you need to burn a disc with Macintosh drivers.

The first problem came when I realised I couldn’t have the 100GB Windows drive I wanted. For Mac to have read-write ability with the Windows partition, it needs to be FAT32. Unfortunately, FAT32 doesn’t allow partitions larger than 32GB and so to be able to have my 100GB I’d have to format it in NTFS, losing my read-write ability. There was no way I was going to have a completely useless NTFS partition just sitting there, so I opted for the FAT32 (although it is still Windows, making it near useless anyway).

The rest of the installation went without a hitch. Following on-screen installation instructions from Windows XP and the ones provided by Apple in the disc image, Windows XP was up and running in no time at all. Now when I reboot my computer, holding the option key gives me the ability to switch back and forth between OS X and XP - simple.

The software seems to work perfectly and I didn’t run into any problems whatsoever - if you do need Windows XP for anything in particular, don’t be afraid to give Boot Camp a try.

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Sometimes, though, I don’t want to see Windows. Believe it or not, I’m quite fond of Apple and the Mac. I don’t want to go into Windows just to test my website out in IE6 and reboot back into OS X. Enter Parallels Release Candidate (Build 3120).

This version of Parallels is simply an amazing piece of software. It allows you use your Boot Camp installation of Windows XP and run that as a virtual machine. One step up from that is a new feature “Coherence” mode. This feature allows you to runs Windows applications without seeing Windows. After Windows has booted up in the background, Coherence mode will let you run any Windows app right there as if its on your Mac. You’ll even have Dock icons for the Windows applications, which even have the option to “Keep in Dock”.

It’s great to see how responsive Windows XP actually is in Parallels. It’s not like using a virtual machine. I haven’t tried gaming in Parallels but listening to a recent interview with the creator, it seems like they will be working on that in future releases. I guess I’ll just stick to Boot Camp for when I want to play around. Parallels looks to be my next software purchase and I cannot wait for this to become the stable release.

This software worked great for me and I was wondering, has anyone else had any success stories or failures with either one of them?

Update:

This is a quick update to my original post, as I thought it wasn’t quite complete. I decided to include some screenshots to show certain features. They aren’t very large, however if you click on them you can view the larger versions via flickr.

Virtual Machine

Booting

Coherence Mode

Drag and Drop - Simple File Sharing

More images are available here. They include a very quick setup and full screen mode of XP from my Boot Camp installation.