Roundup: Turning Your Mac into a Virtual PC Discussion

by Perry Longinotti

Platform virtualization (the process of running a second operating system inside a virtual environment on your computer) has been on my mind a lot lately, has it been on yours? If you have made a shift recently from Windows to Mac you may have wondered at one point if you could find a way to use any of your old Windows software.

This article is focuses on the experience of running Windows Vista as a guest operating system on a Mac OS X host. The host system is a Unibody MacBook with the following specifications:

• Core 2 Duo P7350 2GHz
• 2GB DDR3 1066 RAM
• 256MB Nvidia Geforce 9400m (Shared Memory)
• 500GB 5400 RPM HDD

Read the full content of this Article: Roundup: Turning Your Mac into a Virtual PC

 

great guide! With the virtualization options available these days, I see little point for most people to dual boot. Aside from Firefox and Word, VMWare Fusion is my most used software

 

A great review of the situation. I hate to do this, but I have to wonder how wine on linux run through bootcamp/grub would do?. I would think that BootCamp would have the highest marks, but does wine at least compare to the other alternatives? As a free and safe option, it may be worth a try.

 

A nice review, but a bit strange on at least one aspect -- "inclusion of anti virus provides better value than Parallels"... Parallels Desktop 4 comes with Kaspersky antivirus. It also includes Acronis utilities for backups and partition management.
I will not argue on subjective issues such as stability but giving credit to Fusion over Parallels for a feature that Parallels also includes makes one think whether other moments in the review are as correct as this one.

 

Another advantage of running a virtual o.s is that you can get the same battery life you get in os x. boot camping gives my mac a maximum of 1.45 hours on battery whereas parallels gives me 2+ hours..perhaps more than 3 but i never stayed more than 3 hours on the virtual machine.

 

It's worth a try but it will not run all applications. I know visual studio would not install on cross over for mac (which is basically the commercial version of wine). Simple programs such as python and microsoft office will install though, but their shell is like windows 98 which is quite ugly on a beautiful mac.

 

Good information luke. I have never tested wine, just installed it and made myself a post-it to. I plan on taking it for a quick drive around the block after this quarter. Thanks for the post

 

It's quite good if you only want basic applications. I had no lag on my previous 2gb of RAM. I suggest you give it a try!

 

You are correct. I am not sure how I missed this.

 

I installed Crossover and Wine but decided to leave them off the list because they really are focused on a few apps. Technically they are emulation solutions and not virtualization.

 

I wonder how XP would have performed considering it's a fair bit lighter than Vista.

I've run VMware 6 Workstation on Vista as host and XP as guest on a T9300 (2.5ghz) and it flew.

 

Xp runs great!!!! It requires WAY less resources as Vista. And it is also very stable. I had it on parallels 4 before going to Windows Vista and Windows 7.

 

I am running Windows 2000 now. Its OK and pretty happy with 1 GB of RAM. My MacBook has 4 GB of RAM now. This makes Host and Guest much more usable.

Using this old OS I can get Freelancer (c.2003) to play properly. The game loses cursor focus and audio sync from time to time, but it is mostly playable. It runs a bit slower than my old Compaq Presario 2811CA with P4m 1.6 and RADEON 7500.

I'll probably stick with this configuration to work through some Windows games like Freelancer and a pile of old RPGs.

The minimum system requirements for VM solutions are way too optimistic. And it seems people with beefier MBP and MP systems are having much better experiences with demanding apps like games and HD media players.

 

I run XP in VM Fusion/Workstation on my mac, linux and windows systems with zero problems. It handles a cloned image of my corporate laptop with no problems including VPN, Blackberry, Avaya Softphone and voicemail applications, MS Office, Visio and other windows workplace applications. I do all of my work-work in a VMware virtual, even on my employer supplied windows laptop, so that I can make use of its snapshot functionality, and can easily reload a "clean install" of windows by going back to my original master VM.

I do not play games on Fusion. I disable 3D support. I use Wine for a few games. My Macbook Pro's 8600M is not too swooft, so I don't play a lot of high-end games on my laptop.

 

You WILL be able to play high end games on your laptop. But not on the highest settings. You have a mid range graphics card and it should play most of today's games.

 

The softphone and VPN support is very cool. My current employer thinks UC is snakeoil, but I travel a lot and wish we would enable some of our IP PBX's fancier features.

If anyone else has successfully used softphones and UC solutions they should post here (Cisco, NEC, Nortel, Mitel, etc).

 

All very good to know! Thank you very much.

 

My university's library has switched to iMacs. They use Fusion to run Windows... I wish the lab where I work would do something like that too. Run Xp in Virtualbox or VMware on top of a Linux distribution because I'm getting tired of the BSODs and other glitches the imaging system creates