Back when I got my MacBook Pro, and set it up so it could dual-boot Mac OS X and Windows XP, I dubbed that as “just wrong.” A Macintosh, running Windows? Unheard of! Blasphemy! Yet, there it was, made possible by the fact that the new line of Macs are using Intel Core Duo processors. If Apple hadn’t written Boot Camp to let people boot Windows or various flavors of Linux, I am sure someone else would have.
The only thing I really needed Windows for was QuickBooks. I don’t do computer repair work as a full time job anymore, but I still sell web space and have the occasional “help me!” call. When I found out that QuickBooks 2004 was no longer going to be supported (meaning I might not be able to do online banking with it after April 30th) I checked out other packages that I could run under OS X. I was tired of having to reboot my system every time I needed to post an invoice. Sadly, none of them did what I wanted, including the Mac version of QB 2007 (too many features missing.) So I ended up buying the upgrade to QBP for Windows.
Some time ago, I heard about a program called Parallels Desktop for Mac, which claims to let you run Windows applications from Mac OS X. I hadn’t looked into it up to this point since Boot Camp was free and Parallels costs $80. So I did some reading, and downloaded the trial version. This new version had two cool features – first, it would use the existing Boot Camp installation instead of requiring me to install and maintain another drive-hogging copy, and it now has a new toy called Coherence, which will let you run Windows apps on your Mac OS X desktop instead of confining them to a Virtual Machine window. This, in plain English, is COOL.
And kinda Sick, if you think about it. Windows applications running under Mac OS? Reminds me of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, “Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!” Granted, it’s kinda slow – you have to set aside memory for Windows exclusive use, so that takes away from Mac OS X. Windows under 512M of RAM is painful, but I only have 2G on my laptop. But is is still better than rebooting every time I want to use my accounting package. The only glitch at the moment is an incompatibility with the latest version of ZoneAlarm (Coherence crashes the virtual machine but a regular window works fine.) I imagine they will fix that. You also have to play ping-pong with external devices, since they can only be used by one OS at a time (so if you plug in a USB key, you have to tell the VM that you want Windows to use it instead of OS X.) Still, it’s going to save a lot of time in the long run.