Running Windows on an Apple MacBook is ‘fabulous’

20 years ago

“I’d like to do something that I don’t often get to do – discuss how I bought a piece of high-end hardware. I can do this because I recently purchased a MacBook, and have impressions and buying tips to share,” Michael Rau writes in his article “Windows is fabulous on a Mac” for Daily Press.

Rau writes, “First, I should say that, although I’d planned to buy this product, I had intended to wait until early next year, after the release of OSX 10.5. My timeline was accelerated by one simple fact. As part of some recently acquired professional responsibilities, I find it necessary to work on a daily basis in an application that only runs in Windows XP.”

“I could have gone out and bought a highly discounted, but decent quality Windows machine for considerably less money. But since this application is the only thing I have to use Windows to work with, I decided to go ahead and pull the ripcord and buy what I wanted anyway,” Rau writes.

“We’ve talked previously in this column about how to set up one of the newer Intel-based Macs to run Windows. You need either Boot Camp, which is free from Apple, or Parallels Desktop, which is $80,” Rau writes. “Running Windows through Parallels Desktop is much more desirable because, as opposed to using Boot Camp, you don’t have to completely reboot your system to switch from one operating system to the other. The other component to this is of course, Windows. You have to buy a licensed copy separately.”

“If you’re going this route, I’d like to share a dirty little secret with you. I paid less than half the retail cost for a licensed copy of Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2… Go to a shopping site compiler, such as pricegrabber.com or Froogle, and in the search field, type: ‘Windows XP Pro SP2 OEM,’ and you should have several sites which offer OEM versions of Windows,” Rau writes.

“I’ve been running Windows on my MacBook for over a month now, using it almost daily, and I swear, I have never worked on a machine on which Windows ran faster or with more stability. I have no idea why,” Rau writes. “I wish I could do all my work in OSX, but if I have to work in Windows, I’m glad I can do so in an environment, and on a machine, I trust.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: You must first embrace before you can extinguish.