I bought a Mac, yea, I did

It's been a long time in the making, but I finally bought a Mac as my primary computer. An iMac to be exact. One of the deciding factors was the availability of an outstanding piece of software called Parallels. As much as I want to be a Mac only user, some of my work requires windows only applications. So I needed some way to use these application but still use a Mac.

It was quite easy to set it up. After I downloaded BootCamp from the Apple site, I created a new partition to install Windows XP on. Caveat; you must have a licensed version of Windows XP with Service Pack 2. I do, so I moved on. the 32GB partition should be plenty for what I need to do.

Once I went through the 4 hour Windows XP install (it sure seemed that long), I downloaded Parallels. The version I looked at was Parallels Desktop for Mac, and downloaded the trial version. I know I'll purchase once I've gotten everything to work. The process was so easy it almost hurt. It recognized my BootCamp partition and created a virtual desktop running Windows XP accessible right from my Apple desktop. Later my brother showed me how I could basically run windows applications in little virtual windows, using Coherence, that looked like they were running native to the Mac OS. Very cool. That alone made the $80 price tag easy to swallow.

Now, I've got everything running, loaded my windows applications, gave the Parallels process 1GB of memory, 1GB to the Mac and we are off. Things are running pretty well. So, if you have a daily need to run Windows applications, then I suggest Parallels. It is well worth the money. If you don't need to run Windows applications, then all the better.

One interesting side note. Once you install BootCamp and go through installing the new OS, for some odd reason the Mac defaults the boot order to the new partition. I wasn't given an option to pick, it just set it for me. You would think that an Apple product would keep the default boot partition to the Mac OS, but it didn't. I had to go into the system preferences and change the boot order. It was pretty easy, but at first I thought I had installed windows over my Mac OS.

Oh, and one other little caveat; when Windows is installing and wants to know what partition to install on, I was presented with 5 partitions. I'm not sure what they were all for. I had a C:, D:, E:, F: and a G:. Most were small but two were about the same size as what I had requested. The logical choice for me was C: since I figured thats what Windows would be looking for. I guess my choice was right.