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.

Mixing Windows and Leopard

OK, so at least at work, I still have to use Windows to some degree. What is the best way to do that? Well, there are several. Apple's decision to move to the Intel platform has opened up the possibilities for making use of Windows. Here are your options:

1. Bootcamp
2. Virtual Environment
3. Bare Metal
4. Remote Desktop

1. Bootcamp

Bootcamp is a feature of Leopard which gives you the ability to very easily set up a dual-boot environment between Leopard and Windows (XP or Vista). One starts up Bootcamp in Leopard and it partitions a part of your Mac hard disk. After that it reboots your Mac and you load in a Windows install disk (yes you have to own one) and you go through a normal Windows installation. Once done, the Leopard disk is used to load in Windows-based drivers for the Mac hardware. After this is done, you can choose to boot between Windows and Leopard. I was very impressed with how easy this was to do and how well XP ran on my Mac. I did this on a Mac mini with 1 GB RAM. Still Windows booted and ran well and I had no issues of any kind running XP on the Mac hardware. The downside of this is that when you "need" Windows, you have to boot out of Leopard.

2. Virtual Environment

There are two competing programs that create a virtual environment for Windows to run on top of Leopard. They are Parallels and VMware Fusion. VMWare is probably the most well known player in the Virtual Machine (VM) market. We run a number of our servers in a virtual environment and it seems to work well. I've used their desktop product for years and love it. However, Parallels was really the first to market in the Mac environment. There are differences between the two products, but the premise is the same. A VM is basically a file that lives on the host Operating System (OS); in this case Leopard. When you create the file from within the VM product it creates a virtual computing environment; with a certain size "hard disk", allotted amount of RAM and the like. When the program first accesses the VM file, the screen shows what is, for all intents and purposes, a PC booting. You drop in your Windows (or other OS) disk into the Mac's drive slot and when the VM boots it sees the disks and starts a Windows installation. All of this is taking place in a Window running on the Mac OS desktop. You run through a normal Windows installation and when you are done will see the Windows desktop sitting in a window on the Mac desktop.

The obvious advantage of this setup is that you have access to Windows without having to reboot your Mac. A disadvantage is that the VM can use a fair amount of disk space and can use upward of 700MB of RAM or more depending on the parameters you used when you set it up. Remember that a VM is like a real computer and uses resources as such. Both Parallels and VMware Fusion have a "transparent" mode which makes the integration of Windows and the Mac even more seamless. In this mode, the window that holds the VM disappears and the Windows taskbar can, if you wish, become a floating bar on the Mac desktop. Then each Windows' application, when opened, floats in within its own window just like it would on the Windows desktop. So imagine Safari and Internet Explorer sitting next to each other on the Mac desktop; way cool. When you minimize a Windows app, it drops down to the dock just like a Leopard app. There is also some sharing of resources between the VM and Leopard. For example you can store all of your documents on the Mac, outside the VM. In the VM the My Documents folder is still there, but instead of pointing to a folder within Windows, it points to the Mac documents folder...very nice.

Well, that's all for today...come back next time when I look at the other two options for mixing Windows and Leopard.

Can I Use the Mac for Work?

One of the first tests I wanted to do was to see if I could use the iMac for work things. I do tech support for my company so I wanted to see how much I would be able to do just using the iMac. Remember that this is an older iMac running Panther (OS X 10.3.x), The first thing I needed to do was to get connected and to do that I needed to create a VPN connection. This was actually very easy and I was connected quickly. In fact, I was able to connect to a VPN connection that was giving me trouble when I attempted to do that via my PC. Once connected I tried to map a network drive...that worked. Then I tried some remote control items using our IP-based KVM and that worked as well. Although FireFox and Safari allowed me to do some web-based things, we have at least one or two applications that unfortunately only work well or at all in IE...fortunately the version of OS X that came installed on my iMac was old enough to still have a copy of IE so that problem was solved as well. Unfortunately, current shipping versions of OS X no longer have IE as an available app since MS has stopped production of IE for the Mac. We occasionally use VNC, but that was a little problematic until I discover Chicken of the VNC. This is a great VNC application...much better than just about anything available for the PC. Built-in VNC is also available on newer versions of OS X.

The bottom line to all of this is that I can do about 95% of all troubleshooting of my network and desktops using my old iMac. I didn't have to jump through any hoops to make it happen and it worked really well.

Welcome to the World of an Apple Convert

Welcome to the world of an Apple Convert.

I've messed with computers since the days of the Commodore VIC-20 and the Atari 400. In the early days I had the opportunity to play with an Apple IIE, but never had anything more than a passing glance at anything in the Mac line. When Macs first came out they were too expensive for my meager computer budget and...well...let's face it, the Mac was not really compatible with very much "standard" software. The PC, whether rightly or wrongly, had captured the hearts and minds of corporate America and eventually consumers.

I am a DOS jockey from way back and have used just about every iteration of Windows with the exception of the very first one. It's a love hate relationship. On the one hand it's very powerful, almost every program that anyone would want to own will run on it and it does many things well. On the other hand, it can be incredibly unforgiving, the registry and the shared DLL Hell that most of us experience is a pain, and Microsoft has just never really gotten one version totally working before moving on to the next and a whole new set of problems.

I can't remember how many times I've said to myself...if there was only something really really better I'd switch to it. I've played around with several versions of Linux from Red Hat to Linspire to Kubuntu. They are all really interesting, but they just didn't have the polish that I've been looking for...then it happened!!

I've always wanted to play with the Mac, but I never seemed to have the excess cash to lay out on something that might end up being a doorstop. In the summer of 2007, I was blessed to be the recipient of the gift of an old iMac CRT version...one of those single piece units with the 15" CRT with the charcoal gray case. I had absolutely no idea how to use it or the OS. But I fired it up and went about learning how to use the iMac and OS X. I bought some OS X disks so that I could upgrade to 10.3.9 which is the last version my particular model will support well, I purchased more RAM and a book to help me figure it out. After a week of working with the iMac, I told my wife that if I could I would never fire up a Windows-based PC ever again. I found the Mac to be so very intuitive; things worked on it like I wish they did on Windows. I set out to see exactly how far I could get on it and eventually came to the conclusion that about the only thing that I couldn't do on this was play many of the games that I like to play. One morning I wanted to check my email before going to work and decided to do in on the iMac. I booted it up, logged in, read my email and shut it down faster than I would have been able to do that same set of tasks with my high-power Windows-based PC.

I'll write more here as I chronicle my conversion to the Mac, but suffice it to say that anyone reading this should seriously consider checking out the Mac.