Full time Mac user – sort of

2007-04-25 Computing · OSX · Stupid

Anyone that has been on this site before will know that I have an affinity for Apple Macs, particularly their laptops. Since moving to Sweden I have now ditched windows machines – full time, almost!

Actually one of the main reasons for getting the new MacBook Pro was that I could run, OSX, Windows XP (or Vista) and Linux/BSD on the same machine. Because of work Windows XP is a major requirement, our software mainly runs on it and a lot of development is done on it and after testing that it ran our OpenGL based VizArtist correctly I knew that it was the right machine to have with 2Gb of RAM of course.

So I knew that that was the right machine, but of course switching using dualboot (called Bootcamp by Apple) can be a major pain, so I turned to Parallels. Parallels allows you to run a virtual machine on top of OSX, but in the latest version is its killer feature – the virtual machine can come from another partition – in this case my bootcamp Windows XP partition. And then it can integrate with the desktop so that you can switch between applications whether they are OSX based or Windows Based seamlessly.

So I get the best of both worlds. Obviously I cant run games using it, but I don’t run games on a work PC. Recommended.