With impending travels I have a lot to organise. One of these tasks is to see if it is possible to use windows software on my Mac. It’s a rather awful thought infecting my beautiful Macbook with that awful Windows thing. But unfortunately it had to be done, or buy a new computer altogether and lug two around the world. That was the more expensive and less convient option, although the cute little HP netbooks were quite enticing.
The other option was to attempt to install windows on my Mac and use the windows software on my Mac. Before outlaying $1000 for cuteness I decided to give the windows on mac option a go.
Three hours later I’d added a new language to the dictionary in my head, including:
“FAT32 partition”
“Guest additions”
There is free software called Virtual Box available here. This allows you to load guest operating systems onto anything, such as windows on mac, linux on windows and so on. The beauty of Virtual Box is that it allows you to work quite seamlessly between between your guest (windows), and host (OSX) operating systems. No reboots are required. This was a new challenge for me. I’ve never gone to that level of geekiness before: loading an operating system onto a computer, networking it so the host and guest can share files and so on. My, my, my nerd stripes are prominently adding to my shoulders.
There are a few curly challenges such as sharing folders between the two operating systems, but all in all it was quite easy (with patience in tow), and I can successfully use windows on my mac, which is good and bad! It’s super quick, much quicker than on any PC I’ve ever used, even though I’ve allocated minimal RAM to run it, as I don’t want to slow down my OSX.
