Just my suggestion: new Intel Macintosh OSX/XP hybrid

[rreihart]

I have setup 2 new intel based MacBook Pro machines to run both OSX and XP.

The first time I used BootCamp from Apple. The setup went very smooth and everything worked just fine. The major pain with this method is when you partition the drive and setup XP, you would have to erase the entire disk to reclaim that space once again if you want to get rid of the BootCamp booting XP. The other downside is that you have to restart your machine to boot into XP or OSX if you want to switch operating systems.

Today, I used a third party software called Parallels Desktop. Using PD has a little bit more of a learning curve and you have to fully understand the concept of how virtual machine environments operate. The setup, was very easy and worked very well. The VM emulation is surprisingly smooth and you still get very high performance out of both OS's when running them simultaneously. The best thing about PD is with a keyboard shortcut you can switch very quickly between OS environments.

Ahhh yes, now when I get supports calls from those Windows users I no longer have to switch to a completely different machine to support them. True, I could have just RDC'ed to a Windows box, but I think I will like the response of this setup more.

I just thought I'd put my expereince out there, as I know we have a few "techies" around here. Has anyone else played with these setups?

[lonewolf]

The last time I used anything like that was in 1996 with the old Mac 486 PCI board that allowed you to immediately toggle between Mac OS and Windows NT or 95. Since you essentially had two different CPUs sharing a dual partition hard disk, switching was almost instantaneous.

I haven't touched a Mac in 9 years.