How to get the Microsoft IT Acadamy labs working on my Macbook pro retina

Hi Guys,

I recently purchased a Macbook Pro Retina to do my courses on, I'm doing a networking diploma with the MCSE windows server 2008 and CCNA included. I triple checked and chastised my lecturer that everything would work on the mac, and they kept saying yea yea it works. Now I started my course early march and I have not been able to get the labs working at all. Your forced to install internet explorer for the IT academy labs, so I downloaded and installed virtualbox and used that to run win 8 and by extension IE. But whenever I load the labs you click on the start lab tab and your given the you already have a lab open tab, do you want to close it? So you hit yes, than it comes up with were getting your lab ready, so I wait and eventually it comes up with your lab is ready but when I look in the top right corner where it said lab starting..... before, it now says lab not started and the green tab below it says start lab. Rinse and repeat I cant get it to open a lab using my virtualbox.

So I tried it on a friends windows 7 notebook and now it lets me into the labs, but whenever I go to access the server it brings up the usual windows warning and you hit connect it opens a new tab and loads the connection for a while then comes up with the could not establish a connection error.

Now I have contacted Microsofts IT academy support team and they say visualization software is why it wont work on my MAC, as for the 7 laptop there looking into it.
But my lecturer is adamant it should work but really is not giving me much things to try troubleshoot and figure out, so I'm not sure if hes just saying that to cover his backside.
I know you can run bootcamp which runs windows natively, but do you think that would solve the problem? I used up my last license on virtualbox which has me pretty miffed what a waste of money that was! Anyway, would running it natively fix the problem?
Or is there anything I can do to get the labs working on my MAC?
I was thinking of giving Codeweavers CrossOver a try to see if I can run IE on my mac, but apparently IE does not play nice with CrossOver so I thought i'd try get some advice first.


Thanks for your advice!

Great thanks for that, I'll give it a try see how we go. It's a 2 year course though so I will eventually need to get a license but I can worry about that later . Just seems really weird virtualized software wont work I even went into the apple store yesterday and the guys there were adamant it should work as well.

saturnotaku said:

As a student, you should be able to obtain a Windows license through your school for free or very cheaply.

Click to expand...

Is there a website where I can apply for that? I've asked my lecturer but he reckons there not registered with Microsoft for it.

xcodeSyn said:

Microsoft used to have a site to promote academic software such as Windows and Office, but not anymore after they got the Microsoft Store up. If your department or school has a DreamSpark subscription, you could get free Windows. If not, you could still get free Windows Server versions with a .edu email account as explained here and convert to a workstation.

Click to expand...

Ah dream spark, I was acepted for that a few weeks ago and went onto the site looking for a windows download but I couldnt find it, so how do you get a windows license through that?

Also just wanted to ask does anyone have any experience with running VirtualBox? In the hardware settings I have configured the resources the maximum possible in the green zone to make sure both OSX and win8 get enough resources, but whenever I run win8 through my virtual box it's a little laggy. Not really badly just a little latency, for instance I'm constantly clicking on the button next to the one I want to click on because by the time I stop the mouse, and by the time the mouse actually stops, are 2 different locations. Is that normal? I figured that's the nature of virtualization and emulating, but just wanted to check.

Last thing I'm looking at restarting my programming course, and have a bunch of old .cpp files I created when I had my windows laptop. Is there any software I can use that has the same GUI/ compiler and functionality that visual studio had? What program would you recommend for me to use that's as similar to that as possible? Or of course if I can get the latency down I can always run it in virtualbox, but as it is now the lag will drive me bonkers writing 100s of lines of code with it.

Thanks again for all your advice!

xcodeSyn said:

It's right under Students->Software Catalog. Here is the direct link. Just sign in and pick a version of your chosen software. The product key will appear and choose download.

Click to expand...

Is that the Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry Pro edition? Only windows stuff coming up for me no normal windows 8. Maybe different accounts have access to different software? Tried to download that for 2 days now the download keeps timing out.

I had to take my laptop into the Aple store yesterday OS and mail are a bit buggy, and the guy told me bootcamp is still a virtual installation there's no way to install windows natively. So looks like I'm up the creek without a paddle. Making things better the manager for my course is on "holidays" and wont be back for another 3 weeks, so there's nothing they can do for me till then.

Knew I shouldn't of done this course, 5 weeks gone and iv'e been able to do next to nothing, and I won't be able to do anything for another 3 at best.
So frustrating these days if I had a nickel for every time someone gave me the wrong information just to get my money, id never have to work another day in my life! Hardware wise I love my Mac, but software wise my god iv'e never had something cause me this many problems in my entire life!