Don’t forget the monthly meeting of MMOOS, our local Mac user group, to be held next Tuesday, April 18th, at 7:00 PM in the Multi-Purpose Room at Brunswick High School, on the second floor around back. In addition to getting caught up on recent happenings in the “land of Mac”, we’ll delve into the fairly new VOIP (Voice Over IP) technology. Should be a HOOT.

You’ll remember that last week I was talking about Apple’s Boot Camp software that gently “holds your hand” while partitioning your hard drive and installing Windows XP on your Intel-based Mac. After a week of everyone and their sister installing “the Dark Side” on their MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac minis, reports are that, as usual with any Apple product, “it just works”. Not surprisingly, Intel Macs run Windows just as fast as PCs. Duh.

Lost amid Apple’s Boot Camp announcements and surrounding “hoopla” (a technical term for “excitement generated by a new product”) was the release of Parallels Workstation.

Parallels Workstation is virtualization software. Virtualization has been around for a long time. With virtualization, you can run multiple operating systems on a single physical system, at the same time. Moving from one to the other is a simple as clicking from one window to another.

Turns out that Intel’s Core Duo processors (used on the new Macs) have support for virtualization built right into the hardware.

So, Parallels released a fully-functional, free, downloadable beta version of their product, which will be sold for $50 when the beta period is complete.

Unlike Apple’s Boot Camp, which currently supports only Windows XP Home and Professional, Parallels supports any operating systems you can install on a Intel machine – Linux, Windows 9X, 2000, or XP. Plus, while Boot Camp creates a physical partition to house Windows, Parallels creates a virtual partition containing Windows, which can run alongside Mac OS X.

Because Parallels’ Windows installation is sharing processor time with the Mac operating system, it won’t run quite as fast or as smooth as a natively booted version. However, initial reports are that Parallels blows the doors off of Virtual PC. Actually, a snail with a hernia blows the doors off of Virtual PC. But, I digress.

So, those Mac users hankering to tinker in Fisher-Price Land now have a couple of options. But wouldn’t it be really cool to run Windows applications without Windows? It’s coming, probably sooner than you think.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski