In another thread, I described Mrs. R’s frustration in her Statistics class; a program that’s used in the class (MegaStat, an “add-on” for Excel) is only available in a Windows version; but what she has is a nice new 15" Mac laptop.
So my latest plan is to buy a copy of Parallels, a copy of Windows 7, and a copy of Office; I figure $400 ought to do it, and then she can run that blasted program and succeed in her class.
Anything I need to look out for?
No, this should work fine.
You can do this without Parallels if you don’t mind rebooting the machine to switch OSs, using Bootcamp.
This solution might save you $400. I have not tried it.
Thanks for the link. I had run across that thread–but it sounds like a lot of claptrap to go through. And Mrs. R is going to be using this thing regularly; it’d be Very Bad to have to go through that every time she needed to do her homework. I was hoping for something less fiddly, so she could just fire up her computer and go to town.
Parallels works like a charm as long as you have an Intel-based Mac (and it sounds like you do). I haven’t tried it with Win 7, but it ought to do just fine.
You might want to check the amount of RAM installed. I’d recommend installing the maximum amount of RAM you can if you want to get decent performance while running both OS’s at once. (The white Intel iMacs in my office do fine running XP and OS X 10.6 at once on 2 GB, but my newer aluminum iMac does better with 4 GB.)
My Aluminum iMac does just fine with 4 GB as well.
Parallels is really significantly better with every release. It’ll do fine.
I’ve not used it, but I’ve heard good things lately about a free alternative to Parallels/VMWare Fusion called VirtualBox from Sun. Might consider that, as well.
I can’t say anything about Mac or Parallels, but I just got through installing XP on my Ubuntu laptop with VirtualBox (so that I could run MATLAB and my professor’s own CVIPtools), and I’m pleased as a pickle.
Everything was easy and straightforward (and free, since I already had XP and MATLAB); the only things I needed help on were sharing folders between the OSs and resizing the virtual hard drive, and those were both a simple google search away and very easy to perform once I found out how.
I recently installed Parallels on my Intel iMac. Works very well. The installation in particular was very simple and effective. There are several “modes” for operating it, and those can be confusing-I just leave it in the window mode and run windows inside a window. Works great.
More ram is good.
I am running Windows 7 and it works quite well and is supported.
Well, Saturday I went shopping at Fry’s and the Apple Store, and this morning I sat down, my heart filled with dread and apprehension, to try to get all that Windows crap installed.
I may have to back off on my relentless badmouthing of Windows, because everything went smooth as silk, and Mrs. R is now happily statistic-ing away. I have to say, the entire process, despite the usual Windows incomprehensible status messages and screens disappearing and reappearing, went very well. The Windows installation progress bar even seemed to reflect reality (gasp!).