My Macintosh does Windows!

When Apple decided to switch to Intel chips in all of it’s hardware, they changed to level of acceptance towards Macintosh computers for ever. In the past sales quarter, Apple computers saw a 40% increase in sales over the previous year. Macintosh computers have increased their market share from less than 5%, just a few years ago to a predicted 15%. Many believe the major contributor to this rise is the move to Intel. Intel has given Macintosh computer the speed to match or surpass equally equipped Windows machines.

After the induction of the new Leopard Operating system (10.5.X), end users were presented with a platform that was easy to use, powerful, and fast. Apple introduced “Boot Camp” in April of 2006. Boot Camp allows the user to install Windows XP on any internal disk. On startup, the user would select which operating system they wanted to use. This feature gave “switchers” the comfort of installing their existing Windows software on their new Macs.

Although Boot Camp allows for full speed access to Windows, it requires the user to reboot the computer to switch between the two operating systems. This is not the most convenient way to work. Enter Parallels and later VMWare. The Intel Core 2 CPU family has virtualization built in. Virtualization allows a computer to emulate and operating system in a virtual space. The power of this new feature is that now the end user did not have to reboot their system to access the other operating system. Users only need to start Parallels and select which OS they wanted and it would boot in a window on their OSX desktop. The user could then use this OS in a window or switch to full screen. All the time OSX is waiting in the background. The speed of the virtual OS is not full speed. Your speed will depend on the application running. Office type application will appear to run at full speed. Graphic applications will show a slightly slower speed.

There are some drawbacks to using a virtual machine like Parallels. A system using virtualization must have ample ram to coexist on one computer. Parallels allows the user to adjust the of memory level for each virtual machine. Your Macbook’s Windows XP Professional has been assigned 768 megabytes of ram. When XP is running you will have about 1 ¼ gigabytes left. Windows XP lives in a folder in your document folder. This folder will automatically expand, as more space is required for XP.

Take a Snap shot while you running XP on your Macbook. Snap shot is a feature that will backup your current partition in case something bad happens. With Parallels Desktop 3.0’s Snapshot Manager, you can manage and view all of your snapshots in a tree pane that includes screen shots for each snapshot. Snapshot Manager enables you to revert back to previous snapshots, delete snapshots, and edit description information for each snapshot.

Snapshots are excellent for:

• Bulletproofing your Windows virtual machine from viruses and spyware
• Creating a regularly scheduled backup to revert your virtual machine to any previous stable state
• Rolling back your virtual machine after a software update, system crash, or software testing

In an unpredictable world, Parallels Desktop 3.0’s Snapshots safeguards your data and creates a more reliable virtual machine so you can focus on more important things.