I mentioned in a previous post that I am a MAC switcher. We bought a Mac in February of 2006 when Apple made their historic switch to Intel processors. We love our 20 inch IMAC. We are heavy ILIFE applications users and really appreciate the reliability and overall computing experience on the MAC. In this day and age though, it’s hard to get away without one or two Microsoft applications. For me that one program is Microsoft Money. I’ve tried all the other personal financial programs offered on the Mac platform; Quicken for MAC and MoneyDance. The only one I really like is Microsoft Money, which is not available for the Mac. Parallels for MAC allows me to run this Windows program right on my Mac!

There are two approaches to running Microsoft on your MAC. The first is offered by Apple and is called Bootcamp. Bootcamp gives you a program on your Mac that guides you right into running Windows surprisingly quick. You do need a copy of Windows; I used Windows XP. Bootcamp does support Vista now, as well. With bootcamp you decide which OS you want to run at boot-up time. A downside of using Bootcamp is that you can’t run Windows and MAC OS X simultaneously, side by side. Since Bootcamp gives you all the drivers during the install, options such as the right click on the mouse work. iSight video works in Windows. This is a nice option for someone who is a little nervous about making the switch to the MAC .

The other approach is to use Virtual Machine, referred to as “VM”. A VM is software that creates a virtual operating system or an OS and programs to run in. The user interacts with the VM as if it’s a separate OS and the guest OS thinks it’s the only OS using the computer. The benefit to using a VM is that you can run multiple OS’s side by side simultaneously. The VM is essentially running a software virtual OS and needs it’s own RAM to run, therefore, a minimum of 1 gig on your MAC is essential . I have 2 gigs on my MAC and I allocated 512 to the VM which is running XP. I’m currently trying out Parallels for MAC .

Parallels is able to run my bootcamp partition so it was not necessary to reinstall Windows. I’m very happy with parallels. There is a lot you can do, like saving snapshots of your VM. Say you are about to install something on your VM OS online that you’re not sure you want to keep. You can create a point prior to your install on XP and then revert back to the point before the install (it was spyware or something else nefarious you found out) . You can also share files between OS X and the VM (XP in my case). Here is a snapshot of my Parrells screen in which I’m running a few OS X programs and in the VM I’m running XP with IE open to my blog.