OT - question for the Mac daddies

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TrueBeliever

TrueBeliever

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One of the things I've been meaning to do since I bought this thing, but never got around to, was install Windows or a simulator. Well now Mrs. TB up and bought an MP3 player that will only work with Windows, so now it's a necessity.

Thing is, I'm confused about where to start. I went to the Mac support page, and there's a lot of talk about it on there. However there's 8,000 or so topics and even using search I can't seem to find the basic info. I've already carried over the stuff from my PC, it's just waiting to be activated.

Basically all I want to run is Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. Please help.
 
Have you considered using VMWare? VMWare is a cross-platform application that allows you to simulate a physical PC and install any operating system on it. It runs as an application on your "real" operating system (in this case the MacOS) but runs like a separate virtual PC, in its own sandbox, sharing your "real" PC's resources. VMWare has a version for Mac called Fusion which you can learn more about here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Fusion
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

I personally use VMWare for software development purposes at home - I run on Windows XP but have like 6 instances of different machines, a base Win2K3 machine and 2 variations of it, a DOS + Win 3.11 (for those old DOS games), a Linux build and yes - even an install of MacOS. This software is amazing, and it is extremely efficient / fast (despite the complexity of what it does).

This should be more than adequate for what you're doing - you can create a Windows XP instance, run it from WITHIN your MacOS session, do your dirty deeds then close it as if it was another application. VMWare support is so good it will even discover hot-plugged USB devices from within the virtual session!

Unfortunately, the licensing cost for the software is a little expensive, but erhm ...if you bought it and want to download a "backup" copy of it, you could always try BitTorrent or eMule ;)

Hope this helps!
 
Oh and you don't need a rediculously over-powered machine to run this. My work laptop is a modest machine, a Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz with 2GB of RAM and it can still run a virtualized instance of Windows 2003 Server fine.

On average, each "virtual instance" you have will typically consume about 5-20GB, with 10GB being the norm but you're free to set this yourself.

Now if only I'd sold my VMWare shares before they tanked ..but that's another story :cuss:
 
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