An Assessment of Windows Emulation on the Mac

Here is my assessment of the Windows Operating System emulation on the Mac:

* Apple Boot Camp -- This is a nice option which allows the user to gain the full speed of the machine with the Windows environment. The drawbacks with Boot Camp is that you would need to buy the Windows XP or Vista OS and that it requires you to reboot your machine in order to use it. If your church does not need to use the Mac OS, then they can just run the machine with the windows partition running all the time. Boot Camp even comes with a package which allows you to easily create the partition on your internal HDD that the Windows OS will use. I have done extensive testing of this since the first beta of Boot Camp and it works well. Cost: Windows OS ($300) [http://www.apple.com/bootcamp]

* Parallels -- There are some great features on this package including the ability to run the application as an icon on your tool bar or desk top through Parallels Coherence. You can even use the Boot Camp partition in association with this package. You would need your XP or Vista CD with this one as well. Speed of the physical machine becomes an issue if you allocate over 1 gb of memory for the Virtual Machine on a machine with 2gb of memory. Obviously your Mac OS needs memory to run which is the reason for this issue. But the virtual machine does run fine for most applications at 792mb allocated. But if you have more memory than you can always allocate more for the virtual machine. Another feature of paralells that I like is Transporter, which allows you to transfer your PC's HDD to a Parallels virtual machine. This is a nice time saver if you dont want to install all of the PC items again. Note that if you use Windows XP with Parallels, it must be at least SP2. Cost: $79.00 for Parallels, Windows OS ($300) [http://www.parallels.com]

* Cross Over Mac -- I have not tested much with this package and could not tell you all of the features of it but the main selling point of this package is that it does not need the Windows OS to run the application that you wish to install. All of the applications are installed to run locally on your Mac OS. Any issues with speed or other problems are unknown at this point. But the nice thing is that you dont need to spend the money on the operating system. Cost: $59.00 for Crossover Mac [http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/]

* VMWare Fusion -- This package is basically similar to Parallels but has not gone through as much development quite yet. Version 1.1 has only come available in the past few days . The cost and requirements are similar to parallels however, but there are a few minor items that are different. Each virtual machine requires a minimum of 1gb of memory. Windows XP SP2 is required if you are going to use XP. Cost: $79.99 , Windows OS ($300)

My Disclosures: I run all applications on a 2.33ghz Mac Book Pro and have have received review software from with Parallels during beta tests and I the President of the Apple Pugetsound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E.) [http://www.callapple.org]. I have used a combination of the products at several points during the past year. All costs listed above are based on the costs from the companies web sites except the cost for the Windows XP, which is based on the purchase of the package from Office Depot and is Windows XP Professional SP2.