Run Vista on Your Mac
While Apple’s bootcamp will let you dual boot, it is virtualization software that can let you run Vista right inside your current Mac OS. Virtualization of computers and applications has gotten a lot of attention lately- and for virtualization of computers you’ll hear most of the discussion centered on VMware and Virtual PC. Getting more attention lately is another player in this space named Parallels.
Parallels Desktop for Mac is the first to support Vista and also has a cool feature for taking your existing PC and generating a virtual computer you can run on Mac called Transporter.
While you can install Vista in a Virtual PC or Server on a VMware Workstation or server, they don’t tout this support yet and you may face some headaches getting Vista up and running. Further, we are talking about on a PC. Parallels supports Vista and on a Mac.
Parallels is pretty fairly priced at $79. For the PC you have VMWare Server for free, Virtual Server for free and Virtual PC 2007 for free. Despite this, even for the PC, the best tools still cost a few bucks—VMWare Workstation is a much better tool than its counterparts, but goes for $199, which makes it hard to justify for some. My favorite feature of VMware Workstation is the ability to keep several snapshots and jump back to any of them without a need to restart the computer.
When it comes to supporting the Mac, the new Intel-based Macs makes porting many Windows based applications like these much more possible—and at the same time the days are numbered for the usefulness of the older virtualization products for the PowerPC-based Macs. Virtual PC was once an Apple product (by Connectix before Microsoft acquired them). In fact, Virtual PC for Mac was updated and supported long before Windows virtualization became so commonplace. However, being first may not always be a good thing—version 7.0.2 of Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Mac could be the last. With the platform change to Intel-based systems, the original code base would need to be completely rewritten from the ground up. Microsoft decided against going down this road and so Virtual PC for the Mac dies a slow death as the PowerPC-based Macs fade away.
iEmulator is another PC emulator for the PowerPC-based Macs. While it is reported by some to support Vista, the company suggests “Windows 98 or Windows 2000 for the best iEmulator experience”
But between the growing popularity of Mac and the hardware compatibility issues falling away, VMware is also moving to support the Mac. In a new product for the Mac code-named “Fusion”, VMware aims to leverage their expertise in this area to support the Mac as Parallels does.
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