A virtual machine is a software computer that operates the same as a physical computer. It was time for a different approach: a virtual machine. I was happy with my dual-boot configuration for a few months, but as time passed and I grew more confident using the Mac, I spent more and more time sitting at my desk waiting for my Mac Mini to reboot.
My Dell, Gateways, HPs and other previous PCs, used video cards and drivers supplied by one company, sound cards and drivers from another-a situation that is almost guaranteed to cause occasional conflicts and crashes. I suspect at least part of the reason for this is that all of the hardware and drivers come from the same computer maker. In fact, I found it the most stable Windows machine I have ever owned.
I found that running Windows via Boot Camp was extremely stable. You can also press and hold the Option key when you start your Mac, which calls up a boot loader, which does not speak, so you will have to learn whether to press the Left or Right Arrow key to select Windows or OS X, then press Enter to start the system running the operating system of your choice. I could reboot from Mavericks to Windows by changing the Startup Disk preference pane, or move in the opposite direction using the Startup Disk control panel Boot Camp places in the Windows Notifications area. With Windows installed I could now choose which operating system-Windows 7 or OS X Mavericks-would run at startup.
There is now a way to create a talking Windows install disk, thanks to the excellent work of The Talking Windows Pre-installation Environment project which can be used to create a Boot Camp installation as demonstrated in this AppleVis Podcast. I needed sighted assistance to complete the Windows installation. Unfortunately, once you reach the point where the Windows installation takes over, speech is lost. The Boot Camp application is completely accessible using VoiceOver. I could also have used an installation DVD and my Mac SuperDrive.
I used Boot Camp and a Windows 7 64 bit ISO file purchased from Microsoft to install Windows.
The assistant will partition and format a portion of your Mac's available disk space to accommodate the Windows operating system without affecting your Mac data, and download a set of Boot Camp drivers that will give Windows applications full access to multiple processors and multiple cores, along with USB, FireWire, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and sound output. In OS X Mountain Lion and Mavericks, the Boot Camp Assistant is located in the Utilities folder in Applications. That is when I decided it was time to Boot Camp my Mac Mini. I bought a keyboard/mouse/display splitter, and set things up so I could move back and forth between the two computers with a single button press. Running Boot CampĪ few years back when I bought my first Mac Mini, I set it atop my desk, marveling at its small footprint compared to the hulking Dell PC that whooshed and beeped beneath my desk. I will describe Boot Camp below, but in this article I will focus on a second, and in my opinion better, way to run Windows on a Mac, and that is by creating a virtual machine using a third-party Mac application called VM Fusion. You can "Boot Camp" your machine, and choose at startup which operating system-OS X or Windows-you wish to run. It is possible to run both OS X and Windows on the same Mac. You could keep your old Windows machine and crowd your desk with two CPUs and keyboards, or two laptops. Or maybe you simply want to spend some time perfecting your Mac skills before you start using it for your job. You enjoy the OS X experience using VoiceOver, but you still need to use Windows because a critical piece of software does not run on Mac. To move the Windows 7 image to VirtualBox 4.So, you've just purchased a Mac. Then I got good recommendations to try VirtualBox, which is both open source and free as in beer, and was glad to see there are ways to easily move your VMWare images to VirtualBox. Got Win 7 working there with no problems, which is not what I can say about the VPN setup. So I bought Windows 7 online and downloaded the 3GB iso image and VMWare Fusion for OS X which happens to have a 30-day trial. Previously I had used Amazon EC2 whenever I needed to use windows, to avoid license costs, 20GB of my drive wasted and the CPU/RAM overhead, but this time there was no way out, didn’t seem cool to store the VPN credentials on a public cloud instance, although it’s probably as safe. Their VPN solution only works (or is supported) on Windows, plus the need to test a few things on Internet Explorer ? I recently had to start using Windows to connect to a client’s VPN network.