I’m not afraid to admit that I love my new Mac. I got lucky in that we had to purchase the Mac to support our iPad labs at school. What a great piece of technology. I like it so much I don’t want to use my Windows laptop anymore. The problem is that I support a Windows based network and doing so on a Mac is a bit cumbersome. I thought.
My first stop was boot camp. Great idea but dual booting is old news on PCs. I’ve been dual booting to Linux since I started seriously using computers. I gave this a try and setup was quite easy. You create a disk in the boot camp wizard and then load the Windows OS. After it loads you use that same disk to get the Mac drivers working on Windows. This is a solution, kind of, but it still does not make it easy. In fact, going this method I still had two laptops open on my desk so I could support our network. I don’t know about you but when you are in the middle of something it is not easy to shut everything down and reboot.
My next stop was VirtualBox. I like Virtualbox a lot and best of all it is free. VirtualBox was not all that straightforward and I’m pretty sure someone without my tinkering abilities would struggle a little bit to get things going. It isn’t THAT hard but it isn’t seamless either. I did get Windows 7 running just fine on the Mac and I would be able to support the network without having to reboot.
At this point I was pretty set but I happened to see a web ad for a free 14 day trial of Parallels for Mac and thought “what the heck!” The $80 price tag is not so much that I would say no, but it is enough that it better be darn good. It is better than that. Coherence is what they call the integration mode that basically integrates Windows 7 into your Mac like “Unity” integrates for VMWare. I love that! I need to use Windows for three things. To be able to launch them without launching a whole virtual machine window is worth more than the $80 I’ll be shelling out for this software.
Parallels is my choice but VirtualBox would have worked too. In my opinion, the $80 is a worthwhile investment. It makes my job easier and makes me more efficient.
Apple now has Rhapsody as an app, which is a great start, but it is currently hampered by the inability to store locally on your iPod, and has a dismal 64kbps bit rate. If this changes, then it will somewhat negate this advantage for the Zune, but the 10 songs per month will still be a big plus in Zune Pass’ favor.