ok, so what the hell am I doing!? It wasn’t too long ago that I was just spouting off on never wanting to run Windows on my Macbook Pro, yet here I am doing just that. Plus I’m actually enjoying it, definitely because of the cool geek factor not any love for Windows.
I needed a way to test our new upcoming site in IE. I didn’t want to get another laptop just for Windows, the cost and another thing is just too much. I considered Apple’s Boot Camp, but that I think that mucks with the boot loader, probably requires drive partitioning and requires a complete reboot, which doesn’t make development easy.
So I came across Parallels, which is a virtual machine software. You run the Windows OS inside of Mac OS X. I’ve always been reluctant at virtualization since it requires a translation layer, which used to be all software based and slow. However, with the Macbook Pro and Intel chip more stuff can pass directly to hardware. The reviews all gushed about it and it sounded good, so I gave it a shot.
The software was easy enough to download and setup. Simply specify the amount of memory and hard drive space to allocate. The hard drive is a virtual one and looks like a single file to Mac OS X. This means you can’t really share files between the two, but I just want to use it for testing so not a big deal. After starting up the VM, it shows a familiar BIOS post and then ready to install. I actually went out and bought Windows XP, oh the pain, the pain. The VM automatically noticed the CD drive, so inserting it in and started installing. Typical Windows install.
Once finished, everything just kinda worked. I was a bit surprised. The Parallels software does a DHCP type thing and passes the network through, XP auto-detected and it looks more or less like an ethernet card. So network up, IE running and browsing away. I wouldn’t say running it is *fast* like a lot of reviews I read, but it isn’t slow. It feels like a Remote Desktop over a good network, a little choppy at times but definitely usable.
Mac OS X definitely takes a hit when running it. Browsing, especially with Firefox, was fairly slow, Safari was much better. I have the 2.0ghz duo chip and running with 1gb RAM. I’m going to upgrade RAM and I think that will probably help, it looks like Parallels uses around 700mb or so when I allocated 512mb to Windows. It makes sense too because Firefox uses more memory than Safari.
All in all it looks like it’ll be the exact solution I needed. I can run Windows do my testing and still don’t need to leave OS X. Plus, I can setup and load multiple systems and virtual machines, so I can test older versions of Windows, IE and even install Linux on it if I wanted. pretty weird stuff.
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