Parallels foe Mac?

[rydesteel]

Who is using this? I have a new toy phone that does lots of fun stuff and also will sync up to my PC only problem is we have a Mac, does it work as advertised? I'd like to be able to load music out of I-Tunes mostly but there are other features that would be nice as well. For those of you using it will I need antivirus for the PC side? Thanks all,

Frank

[wheelhouse]

You will need Parallels, a Windows OS, and yes on the antivirus. Once you kick in the Windows side, you are essentially running two different machines. Parallels works really well, but you want to treat it just as you would any Windows machine, and there is a limited amount of processing you can do with both sides running.

[t-hoe]

+1 on what wheelhouse said. I prefer fusion to parallels these days, but not for the uses stated.

[Jawn P]

What specs does your computer have? Expanding on wheelhouse a bit, because you're running 2 operating systems simultaneously, you'll need effectively double the resources needed.

Most newer Macs can handle it, assuming you have 2GB ram and a core 2 duo processor on your machine.

[grscha]

You might also look into Boot Camp, which will allow you to boot into either MacOS or Windows...

[mainemike]

i've used and i'm a dimwit and it wrks pretty well.

[veloduffer]

I've used Parallels for a few years and it's been flawless. I think with Bootcamp, the Mac is only running one environment at a time and you need to reboot to go from one to another. With Parallels, you run both at the same time and jump back & forth by clicking the mouse. Windows is in a virtual window and when you log off Windows, the virtual window closes.

[Brandon White]

Use Oracle's (formerly Sun) VirtualBox. It's free and works just as good. I used Parallels for two years and then switched to VirtualBox for the last 2.5.

Downloads - VirtualBox

Edit: maybe I should elaborate on how often I use my Windows VM... probably a few hours per day. For work - our older software development environment is somewhat Windows dependent - so I need it for maintaining our old sites/software. Our new stuff is all Java so it will run from any environment and I can just use my normal OS X for all development. Ok ... geek time is over.

[rydesteel]

Thanks for the replies and help. All I really wanted to do was transfer music from I tunes over to the EVO. I set the phone up as a USB device created a file and did the old drag and drop not as fast or easy but I have music, lot's of music. I love toys that make me learn new tricks :>). Less Luddite by the day.

Frank

[swt]

+1 for vbox

[rwsaunders]

I've run Fusion for the past years and it's fine for what I need...running MS Project. I do notice that when the Windows mode kicks in, so do the pop-ups.

[xjoex]

One more fan of virtual box here, I use it every day on my macbook pro. Plus, it is free...

-Joe