Inviting the Devil Inside: Parallels and WinXP
Posted by kev Sat, 20 May 2006 00:04:00 GMT
Today I installed Parallels, a virtual machine with which you can run a guest operating system inside OS X. Now WinXP is on my Mac Mini for the first time and I feel a bit dirty. Inside my wonderously pristine unix operating system sits a window with a grassy field and a blue sky and it just feels wrong.
Besides the fact that I have to deal with Windows again, Parallels runs magnificently. It’s been fast, all of my hardware works fine and it was a snap to get running. If you have to be able to test out your sites on IE, I think this is going to be the way to go.
My only complication was getting networking to work. My Mini sits on a wireless network using DHCP. If you’re using your wifi, in the VM config you need to make sure that under networking your wireless connection is selected instead of your wired. Additionally, I had to set my address statically because DHCP wouldn’t work.
At the end of the month trial, I expect I’ll throw down the $40 to not have to install XP on a partition on my Mac or get a PC.
