While the Apple Bootcamp announcement is interesting, a more useful tool for us is the ability to run XP or Vista in parallel with Mac OS X. I’m hearing good reports on the public beta of Parallels Workstation. At $50 we’ll very likely purchase Workstation when we get around to upgrading our dual processor G4. This would allow us to get rid of the Dell laptop that we use for Adagio navigation, weather and satellite communications.
Our platform philosophy is simple: identify the best of breed software for your requirements. Then get the platform that software needs. For 98% of our particular requirements the best of breed software runs on Mac OS X. However, the marine software market is so teeny-tiny that it doesn’t support a big variety of excellent Mac OS X solutions. Some 90% of the best of breed marine software only runs on Windows.
So aboard Adagio, we have both Dell and Apple computers connected to our 22″ Cinema Display through a DVI switch. If we need to use the Dell, we just push a button to instantly switch the keyboard, trackball and display from the Mac to the XP world.
To minimize tearing-of-hair, we do not allow the Dell/XP laptop to ever see the Internet. By “sandboxing” the PC we avoid all the Windows security nightmares. We’ve never had a security breach on our always-connected Macs.
I put Parallel on my Mac Pro laptop and it only gave me 8 meg video ram to work with. Any App that uses video these days need a lot more video ram than that.
Configure Parallels properly and you can have up to 64M. Just wish is went to 128M (BF2)