Windows Class work on a Mac

[mcshunatona]

Good evening,
My wife is taking some accounting courses and all of the discs for the books require a Windows OS of one kind or another. We are both currently running Leopard (10.5.8) and are trying to find the least expensive yet sensible way to accomplish this.
I am considering using Parallels 7 Student download ($39.00) and purchasing Windows 7 Home edition which i have found here and there for $100 or so.
That being said, i have zero experience installing and running these kinds of programs. Is this fairly simple? Do I need to install anti-virus even though it will be running in the Mac OS environment?
Any help would be appreciated, she is only going to use it for the duration of the school year unless she needs it for her job in the future.

Mark

 

[joannas]

I am considering using Parallels 7 Student download ($39.00) and purchasing Windows 7 Home edition which i have found here and there for $100 or so.
That being said, i have zero experience installing and running these kinds of programs. Is this fairly simple? Do I need to install anti-virus even though it will be running in the Mac OS environment?

Mark,

Yes, working with Parallels is quite easy if you are an experienced user. Installing a Win 7 on it is fairly simple as well, and goes as usual.

I commend you to not install any anti-virus software at all, or use a free one such as Avira/Avast/Clamav/etc. Because Parallels does have the snaphots feature. Follow this for more details: http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/features/snapshots
(I'm not sure if Snapshots are included in the Student edition or not)

You may also want to consider VirtualBox as a free alternative to Parallels, but do note that it has much harder learning curve.