I've joined the Mac Brigade but want my XP back

[SimpleSi]

My wife's school has a Fanbois ICT Co-ord (he's alright really ) and got 15 lovely shiney looking Mac thingys which look very pretty but we need to do some real work on them ( ) so we are sticking Win7 via bootcamp on them.

 

But, I was wondering if there was a cheap method of getting a VM copy of the old suite XP machines up on them as well so as well?

 

regards

 

Simon

[SYNACK]

There are all sorts of VM products for Mac, it heavily depends on how your original suite was liscenced, it its OEM your stuffed, retail pack and you may be able to transfer.

 

Still I think you are being a little unfair to them by putting a modern version of OSX up against the dinosuar that is XP. Your kind of training them into Macs by doing it.

[SYNACK]

Oh the options are VirtualBox (free) Downloads - VirtualBox

Parallels (cost) Virtualization & Automation Solutions for Desktops, Servers, Hosting, SaaS

VM Ware Fusion (cost) VMware Fusion: Run Windows on Mac for Desktop Virtualization

[mac_shinobi]

Oh the options are VirtualBox (free) Downloads - VirtualBox

Parallels (cost) Virtualization & Automation Solutions for Desktops, Servers, Hosting, SaaS

VM Ware Fusion (cost) VMware Fusion: Run Windows on Mac for Desktop Virtualization

 

+ 1 to virtualbox and vmware fusion from me, I've tried parallels and it leaves loads of crud behind if you wanna remove it and it corrupted my bootcamp drive ( physical drive which had win xp on it and I had to start over as vmware fusion couldn't use it either after I tried parallels, took me a few hours to get rid of parallels completely. Tried again a few months later after they brought out a new version but I prefer vmware fusion

[Arthur]

http://i.imgur.com/cEVqH.jpg

[Arthur]

It's probably worth mentioning that Parallels Desktop 7 is the only hypervisor which officially supports Mac OS X 10.7 at the moment (inc. the ability the run Lion as a guest OS). VMware Fusion 4 is due to be released very soon however.

[HodgeHi]

VirtualBox was at one point the only VM software that allowed for PXE booting on a mac. This would obviously make it much easier to deploy your XP image OS onto your VM. Not sure if the rest have caught up.

[Haptic]

It's probably worth mentioning that Parallels Desktop 7 is the only hypervisor which officially supports Mac OS X 10.7 at the moment (inc. the ability the run Lion as a guest OS). VMware Fusion 4 is due to be released very soon however.

 

This is exactly what I would have said Arthur - we have been supplying Macbook Pros ready for the start of term and a lot of clients have opted for Parallels which I have to say is very good from what I have seen. This, rather than partitioning the hard drive for dual OS booting.

 

Chris

[SimpleSi]

Oh the options are VirtualBox (free) Downloads - VirtualBox

Ta

I'll see if I can get this working

 

XP - Dinosaur - me?

 

Si

 

As to the others £70 quid for a VM - what a rip-off

[Arthur]

As to the others £70 quid for a VM - what a rip-off

MacUpdate often include Parallels Desktop in their promo bundle's so if you wait you should be able to get it for around ~£31 ($49.99). This is what I did with v5.0 and v6.0.

 

VMware Fusion is a lot cheaper (£25) if you buy an EDU license.

[CyberNerd]

Ta

I

XP - Dinosaur - me?

 

It's not. People keep banging on about XP being old, Pre XPSP1 versions are indeed 10yrs old, but with later service pack MS do actually update stuff.....

 

A point in case is that in another thread I asked how to improve bottleneck speeds on my gaming machine for Deus Ex. Several people told me to put Win7 64 on it.

I added a an SATA SSD in AHCI mode and installed win7 (games on old partition). W7 saw the full 6GB RAM but it made bugger all difference to the application speed. Deus Ex ran identically on win 7 as it did XP. I'm still getting a new GFX card though...