Making the switch part 2 of
Drinking the Kool-Aid?
As one person commented, Oh no, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. It’s not true I tell ya!
So far I have successfully, divided this 160gb hard drive into two partitions using Boot Camp. Why? Why not, I can’t do my job unless I can run Windows.
(I could if I wanted to live solely on a terminal server, but that requires a connection all the time and I don’t have that. As wonderful as terminal services is; it’s not conducive to real world productivity either. If you need quick and dirty access to stuff great, or if you only need limited access to certain applications and don’t want to deploy them to the desktop for better control, terminal services is your friend, but it’s not anything I’d wish on any one for their primary environment.)
Why did I choose Boot Camp? Well at first, because Parallels now has a beta that allows you to use your boot camp partition.
With Boot Camp you basically get one or the other. Boot your Mac as a Mac, or Boot it as a Windows Box. Great if you don’t want to give up any performance, but you do give up a significant portion of your drive (at least I did in my case). Resizing a Boot Camp partition isn’t a simple thing, at least not at this point. You can backup the partition using Disk Utility, restore the Mac partition and then resize. But that’s no fun and it’s a lot of work. So if you go this route, carefully consider what you may install on the Windows side and size accordingly.
After playing with this configuration for about a day, I punted it. I ‘need’ my Windows applications. I need on the fly compatibility and don’t have time to reboot just to get it.
I started using the beta version of Parallels which you can get here. Which allows you to use your Boot Camp partition. It’s still in Beta, but the process is somewhat hokey.
Parallels creates an entry in your boot.ini file which you must choose manually. I suppose you can fix that if you want but then you still have to choose to boot the machine with a hardware profile that also has Parallels extensions with it. A process I didn’t feel like doing. I also decided I didn’t want a hard limit on the amount of stuff I could put on the Mac and/or PC side of life. Besides Parallels performance I heard is “out of this worldâ€.
After making this decision, I restored my original Mac partition and started a new Parallels image for Windows XP.
There is absolutely NO good reason to run Vista at this point, at least none that I’m aware of. If you manage your XP install correctly, you don’t need the additional layer of eye candy and process robbing BS. I don’t need it to ask me every time I click on something if it was me that really did it and do I really want to do what I just asked the OS to do.
If we just required people to take a simple class and get a license to use a computer we wouldn’t have these issues. 
(That’s sarcasm in case you missed it).
The process of creating a Parallel universe (or image) is as easy as it gets. Provide it a simple installation image, the license key and you’re done.
Currently the only applications I have installed on the Parallel XP OS is the Office 2003 suite. Mac Office is OK, but Windows Office is better, always has been, and I need Outlook, not Entourage.
I need something that actually interfaces reliably with Exchange and doesn’t eat my mail.
Using Parallels ‘Coherence’ feature, I can pretend my windows applications are Mac applications. They show up in individual windows as I run applications and processes. (see image above)
So far so good.
Performance? It’s OK, not great, just OK. When you’re full blown in the Windows Virtual Machine, things are pretty snazzy. But when things are running in the background, they certainly don’t get the same cycles.
Outlook is far more responsive when it’s the front application.
More on this later…
I’m still looking for the killer business applications. I don’t need iLife to do my job. In fact for a business machine, one that a company is providing for you to get work done, I’d go so far as to say none of that stuff has any business on a company laptop or machine.
iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, they are all huge time sucks Yes, they are fantastic. But do you really need them for work outside of the graphics profession?
Seriously.
I want to hear from people:
What do you need a Mac for?
What Mac based applications do you need and use?
Help me out here people cause so far this isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
This article eludes to more users using MacBookPro’s in business…
It also eludes to the fact that it wasn’t the hardware that enticed them to switch, but rather Microsoft, and their Virus laden OS.
Yes, spyware and viri run amuck in the windows world, but it’s manageable, really it is. In due time, as OS X gains market share, it too will attrack the script kiddies and folks out to wreck havoc.
More to follow…
Written by datapoohbah on December 14th, 2006 with
5 comments.
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Bill
#1. December 14th, 2006, at 12:15 PM.
I found it easier to quit my job to get away from Windows. I’m much happier on just Linux and Macs. If you’re a Mac guy you may be better off finding a job that doesn’t require Windows.