Replies

“You might want to wait a few months. First the MacBooks are due for a product line refresh that may include replacing the traditional back lights with low energy consumption LEDs as well as a speed bump in the processors. Also, rumor has it that Apple s working on a sub-notebook that will drop the internal optical drive and shed significant weight.”

I know, my main “Macaholic” friend has already told me this. I can’t go to his house without getting a pitch to “move up” to a Mac, etc. He’s relentless.

I got tired of lugging an 8 pound laptop around on the plane and through airports, even in a backpack.

I don’t understand the difference between BootCamp, Paralles and VM Fusion. Do you have to have BootCamp to use or run Paralles or Fusion on your Mac?

If I bought a MacBook or MacMini and loaded a copy of Windows and my 2 Windows based trading programs on it, I guess I could just connect to either my Mac and PC friends networks when visiting them. A dual use machine sounds like a good idea.

I’ve also thought of just buying an external hard drive, partitioning it for both Mac and Windows OS’s and loading the programs on that and carrying that with me instead of a computer. I don’t know if this is possible. The objective is to save money and weight.

I don’t understand the difference between BootCamp, Paralles and VM Fusion. Do you have to have BootCamp to use or run Paralles or Fusion on your Mac?

No, you don't have to have BootCamp to run Parallels or Fusion on a Mac... but it is a good idea. BootCamp is currently a free Beta and will be included with Leopard. BootCamp allows you to live partition an existing HFS+ formatted hard drive into the Mac and a Windows partition where you can install Windows. It also adds the necessary Windows drivers to a newly created Windows install disk. Parallels and Fusion can both access the BootCamp created Windows partition.

With BootCamp you can select whether to boot into Windows or Mac OSX at startup. When running a Mac as a Windows PC under Bootcamp the Windows installation is as fast or faster than a Windows only machine with the same processor. It IS a Windows box. However, to switch between OSes, you have to reboot and start-up from the BootCamp created Windows partition.

Parallels and Fusion operate Windows within a sandboxed window under OSX and switching is transparent. Files and or clippings can be dragged and dropped between OSes. There is about a 5% lower speed to Windows when operated in this manner compared to BootCamp's approach. It will still be faster than most low-end Windows boxes. Both Parallels and Fusion allow other OSes plus Windows to be run simultaneously under virtualization on OSX.

....... I don’t understand the difference between BootCamp, Parallels and VM Fusion. Do you have to have BootCamp to use or run Parallels or Fusion on your Mac?
If I bought a MacBook or MacMini and loaded a copy of Windows and my 2 Windows based trading programs on it, I guess I could just connect to either my Mac and PC friends networks when visiting them. A dual use machine sounds like a good idea.
I’ve also thought of just buying an external hard drive, partitioning it for both Mac and Windows OS’s and loading the programs on that and carrying that with me instead of a computer. I don’t know if this is possible. The objective is to save money and weight.

74 posted on 10/17/2007 5:40:18 AM MDT by garyhope

Bootcamp allows you to dual boot the mac; you need to reboot to switch op/sys.
It's Free from Apple. requires MS license
Parallels allows you to run a MS op/sys ~$40; no need to reboot;
Gussied up open source WINE code; requires MS license
VMware Fusion allows you to run your MS op/sys environment as an application
~$40 full cut-and-paste; no reboot; requires MS license;
seamless including networking it is a virtual MS machine inside your mac under OS X