The joys of Parallels

It’s kind of ironic — I switched to using a Mac because I hated the childish look and the “we think you’re an idiot” user interface of XP, having been a long-time Windows 2000 user. And today I installed Windows XP on my Mac.

But the interesting thing I guess is simply that I can do this. And that it was easy. The upgrade process was virtually painless, and XP runs just fine. I’m using the wonderful program, Parallels, which allows you to run Windows on a “virtual computer” on the Mac. Windows is tricked into thinking that there’s an actual PC on which it’s running. Windows 2000 actually ran better on my Mac than it did on my past PC, and that machine was no slouch, technically speaking.

So I want to celebrate the cleverness of the people who made Parallels. I can run Windows in its own window, or in full-screen mode where it looks just like I’m staring at the monitor of a PC running Windows, or (spookily) I can run Windows in “coherence mode” where Windows programs sit on my desktop just like Mac applications (and mixed in with them), and can be minimized to my dock (the Mac equivalent of the taskbar). This is all amazing!

And then it gets more amazing. Without my having to do anything I can print, email, and surf the web in both Operating Systems at the same time. I can back up my Windows files to the Mac hard drive so that they’re then backed up in turn by Time Machine. I can choose whether to open a file with a Windows application or a Mac one. It’s soooo cool!

Why use Windows at all? Sadly, the version of Quickbooks for the Mac is severely deficient, and I also use a fantastic (but sadly PC-only) application called T-Hub to sync my online store with Quickbooks. With the click of a button (or two) all the transactions effortlessly appear as sales receipts in Quickbooks. So I need windows.

And why the upgrade? I’ve so far been running Windows 2000 on the Mac, but Intuit is about to discontinue support for Quickbooks 2005, and the 2008 version doesn’t have Windows 2000 support.

But hats off to the Parallels team for making a fantastic product that allows me to have two computers in one.

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