Vmware

[delSol_si]

My cousin set me up with VMware. He also set me up on dual boot, but I think I like the VM more. I can now run windows xp inside mac OS X. What do you guys think? Anyone ever dealt with it before?

[Dr. B]

One day I thought to myself: How can I access all those windows features I actually prefer and still manage to eat up all my computer's memory and processing capacity? I've got it! I'll run two operating systems simultaneously!

Dual boot or quit kidding yourself and run windows by default.

Seriously, why have you found yourself needing to run Windows from inside a OSX boot?

[Stuie]

Yeah I deal with it all the time. I have Several VMs with OS all the way back to 98.

At work we load CentOS and VMWare to make our servers Virtual. Super Easy rebuilding them after a crash. Have a sever back up and running in less than a day.

[delSol_si]

Well, the main reason I did this route is that I really like mac because it doesn't crash as much as windows, but at the same time, I need Microsoft Office because that is what the university runs on. I was doing dual boot, but got pissed off because I would have soe files on the mac HD and some on the windows HD and it was too confusing and difficult. I am planning on using safari in my mac OS and using MS office in my XP OS. Dual screen hopefully. Ya, may be a little slower, but all I really do is search the internet and use MS office.

[*sigh*]

We have vmware on a mac or two at work. Although it's better now the Exchange support in OS X was not very good, so they used the vmare on the macs to have windows for outlook and other little things.

It is ok for small little things, but will absolutely kill you if you do anything intensive inside of it, it just isn't meant for that.

Boot camp is the way to go if you want both.

[tinyj316]

you realize that they make office for mac right?

[delSol_si]

Well, I checked out office for mac and it just isn't the same as windows office

[*sigh*]

Well, I checked out office for mac and it just isn't the same as windows office

You get used to it after a bit, it's just layed out differently.

[Svaals]

VMware is cool. When I did server administration with my friend it was great. We got rid of a lot of weird server issues by running virtual servers rather than trying to run several services on one physical box. However... I really don't see the practicality of using it for a workstation.

If it were me, I would go with dual boot. Not that it wouldn't be feasible to use VMware for accessing MS office, etc. in a VM, but I don't see how it would be an improvement over dual-booting.

I'll throw in a shameless plug for Windows 7: Freakin' awesome. I played with the release candidate a lot. The taskbar now functions like the dock in OSX.

[mjdx88]

VMware FTW. best way to run both OS, Im not quite sure what Dr. B is talking about. I have never had an issue with having both OS open, running Photoshop and FCP, It was a bit slow but not much. This is running a 1st Gen MBP 17inch with 2 gigs of ram.

del, check out openoffice.org you might like that a bit more. Its not like the new office but if you like that....well I guess there is no hope.. lol Otherwise stick with VM.

Also if you good with terminal and know a thing or two about commands and code in unix, linux, dos and OSX check out wine.

Cross over works nicely too if your just usings office. It uses less resources. Wine and cross over are the same thing made by the same people... it is a piece of software which "ports" the windows application to OSX or linux. Wine is messy to say the least...you can mess up your system pretty bad with a wrong command. Cross-over is a nice GUI of wine without any system screw ups but it costs about $90 bucks. There is a free trial on their website.