Interesting thing about Macs

[Kaabi]

I recently learned that Macs can run the Windows operating system. I saw a screenshot of it, and the Windows desktop was over the Mac desktop, it looked cool. So, then you can use Windows applications on a Macintosh! Cool, aye?

[TcM]

You mean something like this:


But what about the MAC and Windows performance? It is good enough? So it will be like running a Virtual PC (like VMWARE) on a MAC?

[Johnnyboy]

This was very hard for me to believe, but I now have a 6 month old MacBook Pro intel core 2 duo 15" w/ 2gb of ram and well, it is simply amazing.
I really don't fully understand how it can do all this and since I've worked in the Windows world as an IT guy for so long and used to work on macs when they were running os7, 8 and 9 which were nothing to get excited about, it is hard for me to believe that OSX is SO MUCH better than any other OS I've dealt with.

Right now as I write this I'm running XP using VMWare Fusion (BETA program, so it's free). It is running XP from the boot camp partition I created (Boot camp is an OSX free beta program as well). I tried using "Parallels, but it didn't work for me... XP kept getting the BSOD", but I may have done something wrong in the ordering of things.

see screenshot here (didn't fit right in the post)

Even more amazing than all that is that it is fully drag and drop capable after you install the vmware tools into the XP install! Notice in the pic above that I have a jpg open on the mac OS and in XP using MS photo editor.

I told the vmware session to use 1GB of RAM for XP, which runs UNBELIEVABLY well considering the fact that it says that I only have ~72mb of ram available right now and it is not lagging unless I push it. Obviously I'm working it a lot at the moment... even listening to a CD using iTunes and running the visualizer. The dock is zooming in/out smooth as ever. It really is hard to believe. I don't know what else to say.



Like I said before... this is really hard to believe. It is hard for me to believe that this thing has a 5400rpm hd as well.

Ask me lots of questions... I had TONS before I bought this thing, so I can understand.

[Johnnyboy]

Thought I'd share this too, since it is why I bought the macbook pro in the first place.

I had run my PC into a bottleneck AGAIN with flstudio for creating the music I love to... this time it was the soundblaster live from years ago (which was an amazing sound card by the way) . So, my goal was to move to OSX and run FLStudio in XP (since there is no OSX version). And it works GREAT!

See this screenshot of FLStudio 7 running in VMWare Fusion on XP while I was running iTunes with visualizer, and the following apps minimized at the time... iChat, firefox, activity monitor, moody and system preferences.

FLStudio was running one of the demo tracks (pretty intense one called "Surrealism").

BOTTOM LINE:
I DO NOT produce music in this vmware session scenario because of the little bit of response time delay when playing, but for playback and editing it would work just fine.
SO, I just reboot into XP (boot camp partition) so that I have the whole 2gb of ram for XP and it is MORE responsive then my old PC, which is exactly what I needed.

Now I can move towards MAC tools for music production as well as FLStudio. So far I have no complaints.

[TcM]

Wow man that is fantastic! I really like those snapshots etc... wow!