Windows is a virus
Against my better judgment, I installed Parallels on my new school MacBook Pro. I just uninstalled it. The machine was running slower than I do on a cold morning and getting slower faster than I am with age. The hard drive was running constantly. My available space got down to 116KB (from 14 gigs). Something in Parallels or Windows was running on its own and filling up space; I’ve seen on the forums that I’m not alone. It’s gone. My machine is back to normal, I hope. Windows is a virus.
Tags: mac
October 29th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
I’ve no issue with Parallels or Windows on my MacBook Pro whatsoever. I love it, in fact.
October 29th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Apple invested a lot of time and money to bring OS people can use for their work. So, as I have MacBook Pro as well - for Microsoft and Windows, I am too sexy to install it.
October 29th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Windows is just too big to try to emultae over another OS. That’s just death. Running one OS inside another just seems like begging for trouble.
Anyway, OSX isn’t that much better. I still have to reboot once or twice a day, to clear up memory that I’m assuming Firefox eats up (when it’s not crashing 5-10 times a day).
Still, there are a couple pieces of software I need daily that still aren’t Universal Binary ready. When they are, I’m buying an Intel Mac, so I can actually have a double machine. They won’t be active simultaneously, but still, I can not have two computers on my work desk.
October 29th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
You could get a second hard drive and install Windows on that, and swap out the drives. I have 3 hard drives for my ThinkPad — one with Windows XP, one with Windows 2000 and one with Xandros Linux.
Not the most elegant solution, but we can’t all be tech geniuses like Howard Owens. Hi Howard!
October 29th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Just to sort of throw a counterpoint out there, I run Parallels almost every day, and I can nothing but good things to say about it.
I’ve got a MacBook, 2 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. I’m running the latest whatever of Parallels (I update when it tells me to) with Windows XP. I don’t use Windows for much; just for running various Web browsers for testing purposes and firing up Microsoft Office when the rare circumstance requires it. Oh, and occasionally for running Flash to encode videos when clients want to use that format, because it’s a heck of a lot faster to run that program natively under Parallels than under Rosetta.
Yes, Parallels uses a heap of memory when it’s running. It sort of has to. I haven’t taken a scientific survey or anything, but from glancing at my activity monitor it seems to chew up a minimum of half a gig of RAM, and will take more if it’s available for caching and whatnot.
And yes, Parallels requires a heap of disk space, because you’ve gotta store what basically amounts to an entire Windows PC in a disk image.
But given those two caveats, I’ve found that Parallels works remarkably well, and does exactly what I need.
(The secret, Jeff, is not to run it all the time. Just run it when you need it. The rest of the time, suspend your VM and quit Parallels.)
October 29th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
I really don’t see why windows is even needed on a mac. I’ve doing fine without it since I got my powerbook last year. It may be different for more computer literate people, but for me it’s just not worth the hassle.
October 29th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
@Angelos - that used to be true for programmes like VPC in the past, but Parallels actually accesses the Intel processor directly, so although it is slower than a real machine, it’s not as bad as you might think. Also, sounds like you’re running with too little memory if you’re needing to restart your PPC Mac because of Firefox (though it is known that it leaks memory like crazy).
I’m running a MacBook with 2GB RAM and 120GB HD and Parallels runs fine (only need to use it to run IE for Windows for those Mac-unfriendly sites) though expanding the virtual hard disk is a pain as you need to get under the hood of Windows to get the system to recognise the increased space.
The great thing is that if things start going wrong, I simply load up a new disk image and get a fresh copy of the OS.
October 29th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Hi, Bradley … why don’t you leave a comment on my blog some time? Or ring me up … you know we’re leaving California, right?
Oh, back to Parrallels … I should have that my MacBook is fully loaded with RAM (I’m not so tech as to actually memorize the numbers or know how to look them up — sorry Brad).
October 31st, 2006 at 12:40 am
I can just hear Laurie Anderson re-do her lyrics to fit.
adapted from here. The lyrics may or may not all fit. But that Ew-ah, Ew-ah, Ew-ah TOTALLY fits.
October 31st, 2006 at 8:23 am
So does anyone have any experience with using Bootcamp to run Windows on a Intel-based Mac? I’m dying to buy a Mac Pro desktop, but I’m interested in hearing user experiences.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Amen brother. Amen.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:28 am
I just bought Parallels and Windows XP for testing web sites. (Windows is not just a virus, it’s an expensive virus.)
And then I found out about CrossOver Mac, which lets you run Windows apps without Windows! Suddenly, not so expensive. And the kicker - it’s really difficult to get a virus to run on it!
Anyway, my plans to send the software I bought back were stopped short as CrossOver won’t run IE7 yet. So now I’m hesitantly proceeding with Parallels/Windows.
Nevertheless, as soon as CrossOver will run IE7, I’ll ditch Windows completely and get Parallels.
CrossOver Mac
http://www.codeweavers.com/
Note: it only works on Intel Macs
May 16th, 2007 at 9:35 am
I have an IMac desktop and will soon buy a macbook. I wanted to stay away from windows all together… However, I am a college student and found some of my classes only use windows based applications. Go figure.