Mixing Windows and Leopard: Part II

OK, last time we looked at a couple of different ways to mix the Windows OS and Leopard. I'll continue on by discussing the other two.

3. Bare Metal

In a bare metal setup you would completely remove the Leopard OS and replace it with XP or Vista. OK, the obvious question is "why?", and it's a good one. If you took the time and probably some extra money to purchase a Mac, why would you want to rip out that wonderful OS to replace it with Windows? At my company we are primarily a Windows shop. For better or worse, when the company was formed it really made the best sense to go that direction. We have been with the same PC vendor for over 10 years and have found their boxes to be quite good. But recently they have undergone a merger and that's not always a good thing. On top of that, I was given someone who is the worst salesperson I've ever dealt with. I told my CIO that I really couldn't deal with him and we needed an alternative. My team and I looked at the major players and really discounted all of them for one reason or another. And then I thought of Apple. Their boxes seem to be pretty solid and from what I can tell they get good marks for tech support. So I invested in a Mac Mini just to see what it could do. One of the tests I did was a bare metal install of Windows XP. The reason being that in our environment, as much as I'd like to, I can't do away with Windows. So, if I was going to buy a replacement box, why not see if we could go all the way? And I did. I dropped in my XP install disk and went through a normal install, formatting the hard disk and doing all the things one would do in a normal Windows install. When I got done, I inserted the Leopard disk and I was able to install all of the drivers that I needed...just like I did in Bootcamp. And as has been reported elsewhere, I found that XP seemed to run even better on the Mac than it did on my normal PC...that is a subjective opinion and I've no data to back it up with...but I was impressed.

The obvious downside to this scenario is that Leopard is completely gone from the Mac.

4. Remote Desktop

The last way that I know of to mix the two operating systems is by using a remote desktop environment. VNC works OK, but it's always been plagued by video refresh issues. I was looking for something a little more stable and responsive. Microsoft has a beta version of a Remote Desktop Client for the Mac. I downloaded it and installed it on my Mac and was able to access my Windows machine with very little trouble. It's pretty responsive and just really works. Now, since it is a beta copy I have had a couple of problems with it. The original beta that I tried (2.x) was subject to some intermittent disconnects. But since I've moved to beta 3.x, those have disappeared. I have two issues that still plague me a little. One is a problem getting a label design program to display correctly when I am designing a label. When I am in that mode with the designer program I have to go back to my native Windows desktop. The other thing is that occasionally, but not very frequently, the RDC will become unresponsive and I have to disconnect and reconnect. But I can go for quite some time before that happens.

The downside to this method is that you have to have a Windows machine running somewhere to connect to. If you're going to go to that trouble, one of the other methods probably makes more sense.