Do you still need your Windows in your Mac World?

I recent­ly had a con­ver­sa­tion with one of my Air Force co-work­ers, who the oth­er day bought a brand new Mac book.  Her exact words were, “So in love!.…yes…with my Mac Book Pro!”

The prob­lem that she has is that she still needs access to her Microsoft pro­grams because the Depart­ment of Defense is still on a Microsoft cen­tric envi­ron­ment.  So I explained to her that she has three options.  The options are:

Ora­cle VM Vir­tu­al Box

Par­al­lels Desk­top 7

VMware Fusion

For a seam­less inte­gra­tion, I would rec­om­mend Par­al­lels Desk­top 7 or VMware Fusion. It will allow you run a vir­tu­al­ized ver­sion of any Win­dows (XP, Win7, Win8, Server2003, etc) sys­tem on your Mac. In sim­ple terms, Win­dows and Win­dows’ pro­grams becomes an app for your Mac.  Bet­ter yet, the installed Win­dows apps (Word, Excel, Out­look, Visio, etc) will be on your Launch Pad for easy access.  The cost break down is the following:

Ora­cle VM Vir­tu­al­Box -> $0.00

Par­al­lels Desk­top 7  -> $79.99

VMware Fusion -> $49.99

(***Please note that you still need a valid copy of the Win­dows soft­ware with these options ***)

Why not the FREE option?  Vir­tu­al­Box is more reserved for the pro­fes­sion­al geeks that are con­stant­ly build­ing and destroy­ing their machines and the design is not as pol­ished as the oth­er two. If you need any assis­tance on any get­ting Win­dows on your Mac, please feel free to con­tact me at www.austinitconsulting.com

 

Links:

VMWare 

Par­al­lels

Vir­tu­al­Box

April 18, 2012

Posted in IT.