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oddnendz

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 6, 2007
485
9
Raleigh, NC
My dad wants to buy a new computer for my mom for Christmas. We want to keep this really, really simple for my mom. I suggested a Mac Mini with Windows 8 on Boot Camp. So I have get to gather research in support of my suggestion. I don't know much about Boot Camp or Windows 8. When I switched to Apple, I cut all ties with anything to with Windows.

I need to know:

1) Will Windows 8 work in Boot Camp on a new Mac Mini?
2) Is there a good guide to setting up Boot Camp with Windows 8?
3) Can I remotely control her Mac -- to do updates, etc... even though she will live in Windows 8 (Boot Camp) for the most part?
4) Can someone point me to a good guide for setting up Remote control of a mac? I live about 2 hours from her, so I would like to be able to control it from my home.

Please note: having her convert to Mac is not an option. There are programs she absolutely needs apparently and I am not having that conversation again..

Thanks for your help..
 

chrfr

macrumors G5
Jul 11, 2009
13,520
7,043
If she won't ever use the Mac OS, it doesn't make much sense to buy a Mac. It's quite likely that whatever she needs to use would work fine in a virtual environment with VMWare Fusion or Parallels, so that might be worth pursuing and might let her transition to OS X gradually.
To answer questions 3 and 4, Boot Camp is 100% Windows so there's nothing different about remote access to a Mac that's running Windows via Boot Camp vs. any other Windows computer.
 

xcodeSyn

macrumors 6502a
Nov 25, 2012
548
7
My dad wants to buy a new computer for my mom for Christmas. We want to keep this really, really simple for my mom. I suggested a Mac Mini with Windows 8 on Boot Camp...

Please note: having her convert to Mac is not an option. There are programs she absolutely needs apparently and I am not having that conversation again..
Hi, here's my question, if your Mom absolutely needs to run programs in Windows, why force a Mac on her when she has no interest in it? Why not just buy her a Windows 7 or 8 machine? Here's an example, this one is a touch screen laptop with Windows 8, and has a similar or slightly slower CPU to the low-end Mac Mini. It has a touch screen to complement the Win 8 Metro UI in addition to the traditional keyboard and mouse.

If anyone is doing more than 80% work in Windows, there seems very little justification of running Windows in Boot Camp in my opinion, and it's like 100% in your Mom's case. Another advice is to test run Windows 8 before considering buying it since it offers a very different user experience than previous versions. Some people like it, and some hate it. So eventually only your Mom's opinion counts. If you still insist on buying a Mac Mini for her after careful consideration, yes, Windows 8 works in Boot Camp and you can print the manual when starting the Boot Camp Assistant located in the /Applications/Utility folder or starting from here. I am no expert on remote desktop and have no idea how you are planning to connect to the remote computer without potential security breach, so can't comment on your other questions.
 

vistadude

macrumors 65816
Jan 3, 2010
1,423
1
The mac mini is one of the best computers in it's price range in terms of having a compact computer that has a decent processor in it. It's extremely easy to upgrade the RAM for non techies and it has very few moving parts, just a fan or two and a hard disk.

1. Windows 8 will work with the present mac mini, windows 7 will too.

2. There's a guide here. It's definitely not easy because there are so many steps involved, but it's not harder than installing windows on any other computer.

3. You can remotely control the mini with remote desktop, vnc, or team viewer. But you will need to do the bootcamp process in person as you would lose the connection during the install and restarts.

4. Team viewer is the easiest, but they keep changing versions so I'm not sure where their guides are anymore.
 
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