Not About Cycling

Last night we had friends over and during the course of the evening, one of them remarked that she liked to be around me just for all the electronics.

It's not that I have that much stuff. But I really do have a soft spot for electronic toys, and all the stuff you need to go with them.

My Newest Toy

I just received (late last week) a new Apple Macbook Pro 17". Without wanting to gush, can I just tell you that this is the computer I've waited all my life for. A fast Intel processor (2.16 ghz Duo) and 2gb RAM. But the specs aren't why I'm excited, at least not directly. To understand why I'm excited about this machine, I first have to tell you that I am a Macintosh fan. I'd choose a Mac any day over a Dell or a Gateway or other Wintel/AMD box. The hardware is elegant, and the OS is really really nice.

but...
You knew there had to be a "but" in here. I use two software programs (not for work) that are available only for Windows. Additionally, I developed and maintain a database which is cross platform, which means that I need both a mac and a windows machine.

The Solution
My new Macbook Pro is both machines in one. I have used Virtual PC extensively with my old PPC based Powerbook, but it was a kludge, and a slow kludge at that. The new Intel based Mac opens up a whole new world. Using Apple's "Bootcamp" I partitioned a small section of my hard drive and installed Windows XP SP2 on it. Everything that I can throw at it runs just as well as it does on my Dell. Nothing, nothing, fails to work. The speed is amazingly good, because this is not an emulation package...Windows is addressing all the hardware natively (except the Boot ROMs which are emulated, but doesn't effect performance in the slightest). It runs just as fast as the brand new Dell that a coworker just got, both machines are the same spec (2.16 duo/2gb ram, same video etc.). The drawback to this solution is that if I want to switch to Windows, or back to OSX, I have to reboot.

Parallels
Enter Parallels. This software package is more like Virtual PC, except that it doesn't emulate the hardware, it just provides access to it for Windows XP directly, largely bypassing the OSX layer. Just a keyboard command and I can switch back and forth, copy and paste from one to the other, all incredibly fast...especially compared to previous solutions.

Bravo to Apple for switching to Intel. It's what I've been waiting for forever.