Virtual machines for CRIMPers

Posted by Hugh
Feb 7, 2016 at 05:54 PM

Thanks for the tip about Veertu - I hadn’t heard about it, and it sounds as if it’s worth exploring.

I realise quite a few people probably want go from Windows to Mac, but for those who wish to go the other way there’s also Crossover on the Codeweavers site; I’ve tried it, but some time ago now and so briefly that I wouldn’t want to give a view of it. And, as mentioned above, there’s Parallels. As a long-term experiment I did use Parallels for a couple of years to run Dragon Naturally Speaking together with MS Word, various other Windows applications and the inevitable Windows anti-virus software (more to protect others than me) on my Mac. I think the word “cumbersome” was used earlier in this thread; I’d describe my experience as “very cumbersome”. The combination of Parallels plus Windows 7 plus Word plus Dragon plus AV software required installation of the (unofficial) maximum of 16Gb of RAM in my three-year-old i5 Mac Mini, and slowed it down considerably. In the end all the fuss as well as improvements in Dragon for the Mac persuaded me to give up the experiment; in retrospect, it reminded me of the painfully tedious maxing-out of much more limited resources in the early days of PCs, and it wasn’t what I wanted my computer-use to be.

I hope Veertu and the other suggestions above offer a distinctly better experience!