Considering the "Dark Side"...Please Help Me Decide...

JoelBC said:

I am not surprised as there are definitely more hoops to go through for those who are i) new to Mac and ii) need to run Windows programs...I, like you, can setup and fully configure a Windows machine in a day and, trust me, my machine is highly customized...

I figure it will take me a week to get my MBA setup because of the learning curve...that however, is part of the fund as long as everything works as planned...

I hope that I get along better than you but will report once done...thanks for all the feedback...

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I wish you well in your attempt to configure your Mac to run Windows based programmes. By the way, I have been using personal computers for 30 years, almost on a daily basis. Started with one of the early Apple machines with 64K memory and an external floppy disk-drive. Later graduated to an IBM machine running MS DOS and 256K memory!! Then a range of different Window's based PCs. I have also used various MACs at different times and can find my way around the Apple OS.

So the issue isn't so much a lack of knowledge on how various operating systems work or how programmes/applications should perform as I know exactly what the programmes should do when operating under Windows, but I could not get them to run in the same manner with Windows installed under Parallels.

The "experts" at the Apple store said they could not advise as they didn't know how the Windows programmes were supposed to work. The support services of the Windows software companies such as Serif and CoffeeCup, said their software was not designed to run under a Mac and could not assist. I tried Parallels Support function and got zero response!

But anyway, good luck and I will be interested to hear of your experiences.

regards - John

mac hardware + windows software does work

I run windows on a macbook pro and do a lot of power user stuff... music production, graphics, multi media, etc. Works great. But, sometimes there are driver issues initializing and you just need to restart (like after running out of battery power and the computer clicking off when it restores the sound isnt working properly and instead of going thru sound settings i just restart and it's all fixed).

Also sometimes the keyboard lights dont come on in the same scenario... restart.. .fine

I use windows vista, so thats part of the problem. Definitely do windows 7.

If you have software you rely on in windows, lots of files on windows, why even switch? I have the same problem - very proficient in some software that isnt made for mac.

I say get the awesome hardware, load bootcamp / partition majority for windows, and just keep a small hard drive for mac OSX to browse web, listen to music, and other stuff the mac osx is nice for...

snowboardfoo said:

I run windows on a macbook pro and do a lot of power user stuff... music production, graphics, multi media, etc. Works great. But, sometimes there are driver issues initializing and you just need to restart (like after running out of battery power and the computer clicking off when it restores the sound isnt working properly and instead of going thru sound settings i just restart and it's all fixed).

Also sometimes the keyboard lights dont come on in the same scenario... restart.. .fine

I use windows vista, so thats part of the problem. Definitely do windows 7.

If you have software you rely on in windows, lots of files on windows, why even switch? I have the same problem - very proficient in some software that isnt made for mac.

I say get the awesome hardware, load bootcamp / partition majority for windows, and just keep a small hard drive for mac OSX to browse web, listen to music, and other stuff the mac osx is nice for...

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got two mac minis, one a 2010 sever and the other the later base mac mini. The server is easiest to maintain: windows on SSD and OS X on the HDD. Use OS X for backup and on the OS X partition is also a exFat partition that I back the data to from Windows (FBackup - free). The later model gave me grief trying to install only Windows on it and then have valid backups through Winclone / OS X but managed in the end. That is a story for another time.

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JoelBC said:

I thought that i) there was a difference / problem with Outlook in that Outlook for Mac will not open the MSG files created by Outlook for Windows which will be a huge problem for me and ii) there are differences / problems with Excel macros, Word formatting, etc. in moving files between Mac and Windows versions...any truth to this?

Thanks,


Joel

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Outlook for mac is a third party product bought in by microsoft. You can import into outlook for mac reasonably OK but I have not tried the other way round. I did read that there are (serious - whatever that might mean) problems with outlook for mac but don't remember what it was exactly. I finished up not installing it the second time I installed office and was one of the reasons I kept it on the windows side (what I tried to avoid as much as possible)

JoelBC said:

I am going to install Parallels and to the extent that it works without any hitches I will stick with it for the time being.

Click to expand...

If I am correct you have a Samsung SSD.

When I run Windows in bootcamp on a SSD then by default it is running in IDE mode. With my previous Intel x25M-G2 80 Gb this made not much of a difference with running it AHCI mode but the Samsung 830 has a twelve times improvement in AHCI as opposed to IDE and running with a quedepth of 32. It is double the speed when using larger sequential files.

There is a patch that you can apply to have the Windows 7 running in bootcamp in AHCI - this works for me on the 2011 Mac mini (2,3 Ghz, base model): http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...ing-AHCI-for-Windows-on-MBP-2011-now-possible

Don't know the impact of this when running it under Parallels.