PC software on a MAC, what does anyone recommend?

[Angi]

Hi,

Please could anyone give me any suggestions on what the best PC compatibility software for a MAC so it will run Actinic?

Many thanks

Angi

[Chunkford]

Either vmware for a paid solution, or VirtualBox for a free solution

[Cheapprices4u]

ive run parrallels or boot camp and just install xp

personal preference is bootcamp partition then use parralels to run from your osx desktop


im sure gabe uses osx aswell

[gabrielcrowe]

i most certainly do, the only way to fly, is vmware fusion.

[Cheapprices4u]

oops forgot about fusion

ive justmade myself a hackintosh and run dual boot

[NicolaUK]

I use Parallels

[Benjamin Dyer]

All of these are good solutions. I run Sun's Virtual Box, for not other reason than its free and seems to allocate resource smarter than VMWare.

[chris ashdown]

Never understood what people see in the Mac apart from Historic ease of use and less chance of virus against very high purchase price and high price of limited software

Is not the ease of windows near enough nowdays to be equal to Mac? and what other benifit do you see between the two systems

[Cheapprices4u]

personally use windows most of the time, but garagesale on the mac is awesome for ebay auctions

as you say less problems with bugs etc

but reguarding cost, i just put it on another hard drive in my dell vostro, so cheap apple
must admit some of the adobe programmes seem smoother in osx

[pinbrook]

Never understood what people see in the Mac apart from Historic ease of use and less chance of virus against very high purchase price and high price of limited software

I've always assumed it was the target market, Photoshop was originally only designed for MAC and only available on MAC, thus was the only option for professional graphics. It was only when photoshop was rolled out on windows that the crossover started.

Abit like actinic only having been built for windows. software to run windows on mac is fairly new too.

[PatchworkRabbit]

Never understood what people see in the Mac apart from Historic ease of use and less chance of virus against very high purchase price and high price of limited software

Is not the ease of windows near enough nowdays to be equal to Mac? and what other benifit do you see between the two systems

The look and feel far exceeds windows. I also like that it's less power hungry and takes less space.

But you'll never beat Mac for ease of installing new apps. How do you get better/easier than drag and drop? Cuz that's all it takes. Drag a new app into your applications folder and that's it, it's installed.


I don't, however, run any windows emulators on it. I run Actinic and Gimp on my £150 Asus Eee-PC.

[NicolaUK]

Never understood what people see in the Mac apart from Historic ease of use and less chance of virus against very high purchase price and high price of limited software

Is not the ease of windows near enough nowdays to be equal to Mac? and what other benifit do you see between the two systems

I'm a Mac user of 20 years, my primary occupation is a designer. Photoshop has been mentioned and I can honestly say that using PS as an example on Win is just not the same as on Mac, it's not fluid, it doesn't 'look' right - I know that sounds silly but it's one of those things you just 'see' as a regular user.

Obviously there's the aesthetics, ease of use, it just works, no real virus problems.

I originally ran Parallels so I didn't need two machines on my desk and I could run Actinic + Quickbooks, I'm not a Win hater by any stretch of the imagination but I'll always choose Mac. I don't run Actinic 24/7 on a Mac anymore but do keep it on my laptop as a dev machine or when I'm away I can take sites with me if necessary.

[NormanRouxel]

Never understood what people see in the Mac apart from Historic ease of use

Look at it from the Mac users perspective and see why they don't switch to Windows. Let's say you've been using a Mac for 10 years. You'll have watched your Windows counterparts regularly crashing, re-installing the O/S, downloading humongous updates month-on-month, paying year on year for firewall / anti-virus / anti-spyware services, etc. That "ease of use" when compared with "regular problems" is quite a significant time and peace of mind saver.

Sure, they cost more (good design and smooth operation tends to - otherwise there would be no luxury car market for example) but they last a lot longer too.

I've quite a few friends (and my wife) who've switched to Mac's. None of them are regretting it.

In my Windows camp, I have 2 desktops, 2 laptops and about 5 virual PC's (so I can run different point versions of Actinic). It's a nightmare keeping that lot up to date with Microsofts monthly bugfix cycle.

[leehack]

Download Safari for Windows and take a look at your site on that browser compared to your normal browser. I think that is one of the quickest and easiest ways to express the difference in look and feel.

[carbontwelve]

I find it quite ironic that microsoft word looks and feels and even operates better under osx than on xp or vista, indeed word 2008 is only available on macs and is such a nice application to use, microsoft really did a good job on it just a shame their windows version is so horrible to use.

In addition the operating system for macs is designed to load balance both memory and processor capacity I have vista basic installed on a seperate partition and it can only use one of my dual core processors while osx uses both giving me all four cores accross two chips, I would have to pay for the most expensive 64Bit version of vista to get the same performance.

To run windows apps on osx I first see if there is a osx version or similar, if not then I run it using vmware. With 16GB of ram and two dual core 2.66Ghz Xeons the mac pro pushes out a lot of heat but I have never had any issues of slow down.

Ironically the windows boot partition and the few editions I have running under vmware have crashed multiple times while in the three years I have had osx its crashed once and that was due to me causing it.

Windows has its use same as osx, im not going to say one is better than the other because its obvious one has a better footing, but they do the same job and at the end of the day it all comes down to personal preference.

Finally to answer your question, vmware fusion is the best I have used, so long as you have 4GB ram you should be able to run a copy of vista within it and notice no slow down what so ever.