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Subject:Re: Mac laptops and Tech Comm From:Phil <philstokes03 -at- googlemail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:13:13 +0700
I think the answers have been covered, but here's my take:
You can't use Frame, Flare and quite a few other Tech comm tools on a mac natively, so if you're going Mac you need to run an Windows and/or Linux installation on your mac box anyway. That should make you consider why you need a mac box at all. Of course, you can't run any mac apps on any other box, so if you need Mac OS then you can put both Windows and Mac (and LInux, and Chrome, too for that matter) all on a single Mac.
You can do that three ways, as has already been pointed out:
via bootcamp (internal software that comes with mac)
via VM software such as Parallels or VMFusion (3rd party s/w you have to buy)
via rEFIt bootloader (this is just a boot picker actually, but it will let you switch between multiple OSs easily)
I've tried all three ways and I prefer Parallels personally because you can actually be booted into both systems simultaneously, share drives and other resources, and even cut and paste between them on the fly. Parallels also sets up all the peripherals and drivers for you so its also very easy to set up and get going.
You'll want a minimum 8GB RAM to run that at decent speeds (yes, I know there are some doing it on 4GB, but you're either experiencing lag or you're running much heavy duty stuff on both OSs at the same time).
In all cases, you'll of course have to buy the Win OS on top of buying your Mac, and the software to run on it.
You'll also need a reasonable amount of internal disk space if you want to carry all those OSs around with you.
If portability 's not an issue, consider installing one of them on an external drive.
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