Windows under OSX question

Post #343,337 by mvitale 6/5/11 4:28:58 PM Reply	Windows under OSX question I think there's about to be another iMac appearing in the house, but weaning the user of the new device off of Windows (old and newer games) is going to be a harder task. So to install Windows, what's the recommended way to do it under OSX, and why? The Windows OS will be XP SP2 off the CD, if it matters. -Mike "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Historical Review of Pennsylvania
Post #343,338 by malraux 6/5/11 5:18:53 PM Reply	I use it in VMWare Fusion But I don't play games under Windows, so who knows if that works. The alternative is Bootcamp. Or Steam. :-) Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #343,340 by Another Scott 6/5/11 5:38:39 PM 6/5/11 7:52:53 PM Reply	Vir[t]ual Box seems fine to me. I installed XP on it without many incidents. http://iwt.mikevital....iwt?postid=44161 Good luck. Cheers, Scott. Edited by Another Scott June 5, 2011, 07:52:53 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #343,342 by Steve Lowe 6/5/11 5:58:46 PM Reply	VMWare Fusion here, too. But I'm not a gamer, either. If you go the VM route, give it as much RAM as you can. If you're buying a new iMac, get one that supports 16gb, and max it out. I'd think a quad-core i5 with 16gb RAM, bigass HDD, and the 27" display would run XP in a VM swimmingly.
Post #343,343 by folkert 6/5/11 6:03:16 PM Reply	VMWare fusion... WindowsXP is not very "unknown" and is typically well performing in VMWare. Virtual Box also gets high marks from many people I know and using it in OSX.
Post #343,344 by SpiceWare 6/5/11 6:22:39 PM Reply	I'm happy with Parallels Ars Technica did a review of it, including a XP SP 3 virtual machine. It came out better than VM Ware in most of the benchmarks, especially the game ones. http://arstechnica.c...he-ars-review.ars If the user plans to run any old DOS games, check out Boxer. It's a Macified DOSBox. http://boxerapp.com/
Post #343,346 by malraux 6/5/11 7:42:47 PM Reply	I gave up on Parallels After too many weird lock-ups, crashes, and behavior. YMMV. :-) Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #344,670 by mvitale 7/9/11 12:27:05 AM Reply	Verdict: Miserable failure I tried VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and Boot Camp. I was able to get Windows XP installed under all 3. The problem with both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion is that 3D gaming (such as the games that we've already purchased through Steam) is ass-tastic in a virtualized Windows environment. The problem with Boot Camp is that it requires Windows 7...And it also is essentially running Windows on some very expensive (though admittedly blingalicious) hardware. I originally wanted a virtual environment so that I could install everything to a base version, make a backup of the .vbox (or whatever) file, and if the VM got corrupted/virused/whatever, just copy over the .vbox backup and voilà -- back to normal! Not so much. Tomorrow, we return the iMac and purchase some kind of actual Windows hardware. -Mike "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Historical Review of Pennsylvania
Post #344,671 by Another Scott 7/9/11 8:56:29 AM Reply	Interesting. You might have a couple more options. Until the "VM" is in hardware, there are going to be compromises - especially for hardware-intensive things like gaming. It's probably a moot issue at this point, but you still have a couple more options, I think. 1) Snow Leopard on PC hardware - http://tonymacx86.bl...dge-customac.html People triple-boot such things. IIRC, Apple's license will allow virtualization of Lion. (They presently allow it on OS X Server, IIRC.) I'm sure they'll still make it non-trivial on non-Apple hardware though. Lion is expected to run fine on TonyMac's stuff, but things do break. (I've not been brave/stupid enough to try it myself as I don't have any appropriate hardware.) I believe that people have run OS X in VMs on PCs, but I don't recall the details. 2) BootCamp supposedly supports XP, but you need the right version - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3777 - that was last updated in March. HTH a little. Good luck! Cheers, Scott.
Post #344,677 by mvitale 7/9/11 11:56:23 AM Reply	Re: Interesting. You might have a couple more options. Thanks, but the point was to run a virtualized environment so that he could have Windows for gaming and such, and I could have Mac for easier protection of the Windows environment. I was the one who wanted OSX for the management side; he's not exactly dying to have a Mac. Boot Camp was never my favored option to begin with precisely because it's turning Mac hardware into a Windows box, with no .vbox file to easily back-up to this server for easy flashing. -Mike "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Historical Review of Pennsylvania
Post #344,673 by malraux 7/9/11 9:49:47 AM Reply	Did you enable hardware acceleration? You need VMWare Tools installed too. Have you thought about using Wineskin or Crossover Games for the gaming? Steam is available for the Mac as well, but I would imagine you would need to repurchase your games. Portal is pretty good on the Mac. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #344,678 by mvitale 7/9/11 11:59:11 AM Reply	Re: Did you enable hardware acceleration? Yes, I enabled all the accelerations I could find, and did also install VMWare Tools. No help. We did download Steam, and of the 10 games that we have purchased on his Steam account, 2 were available on OSX. Repurchasing was not required; games on his account were there and available no matter which OS we logged in from. Just the Windows-only games (like Call of Duty) were thoroughly unacceptable for actual playing. When you're playing an FPS, frame-rate matters...And when you can't aim your weapon because you're only getting 8 FPS or whatever, that makes the game unplayable. Which makes it all a moot point. -Mike "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Historical Review of Pennsylvania

Welcome to IWETHEY!