Avigayil Damm

Since 2005, I have converted from being a Windows user to being a Mac user, although not entirely, as I still use Windows at work. I have been very satisfied with Mac, it has proven itself as more ‘superior’ many times. For example, when I just joined my previous office, as it was still being set up, I did not get a laptop immediately. I had to work using my private laptop (an iBook G4) for a few weeks. When I typed in the wireless network key, not only did it connect to the internet, but it immediately detected every available network printers, and I could print with no problems at all.

My iBook became fuller and fuller (it only had 40GB of hard disk space), as I have accumulated more and more files, pictures and songs (I have up to 8 days of songs at the moment, back then it was probably about 4 days of songs, a total of almost 10GB). I decided to get another one with a larger hard drive space and higher specification (plus, Leopard and Intel-based Macs just came out). What also intrigued me to getting a new one was the fact that I could also install Windows on the Intel-based Mac, because some applications that I do like can unfortunately only run on Windows (a small example being the Windows Live Writer, with which I update my blog or the computer aided translation tool, SDL Trados). So after careful consideration, I got myself an iMac with 300GB hard disk space and 2GB of RAM. That was more than a year ago.

After having bought that iMac, I looked up all sorts of articles, reviews and whatnot about installing Windows as a virtual machine on a Mac, and what application I should use to do this. After careful consideration, I decided to use Parallels Desktop, and I don’t regret it at all! It took me quite a while to actually install this (I bought Parallels Desktop beginning of June) since I had to muster up my courage, but now I am really happy that I finally did it this weekend.

Installing Parallels Desktop on the Mac was of course quite easy, but the installation of Windows and subsequently Office and some other Windows-based application was what worried me. And it turned out that I worried for nothing at all! The setup process was so easy, as easy as one two three. It was just a matter of following the step-by-step guide from Parallels, and voila! Windows was installed, and installing everything else after that is just as easy as installing it on a ‘real’ Windows computer. Here is a screenshot of my desktop now.