VMWare for Mac in beta

It's about time VMWare got their act together and released a version of their software on Mac (even if it's only in beta release)! Of course, I didn't care about this before I actually bought a Mac.

Previously, there were only 2 ways of running Windows on a Mac:

1. Using Apple's boot camp (which installs Windows natively on the machine)
2. Using Parallels Desktop for Mac, which is a VMWare competitor and beat them to the punch in stitching up Mac users who wanted to run a virtualised environment.

Why am I posting about this? Because running a virtualised environment is much easier than installing an OS from scratch natively - not because it's hard to install but because it's annoying having to reboot to change operating systems. In a virtualised environment, it's as simple as firing up the virtualisation software (if you can't tell yet, I'm a long time VMWare user).

Oh, the other thing is that you have to pay for Parallels. VMWare has a free version of their product, and we all LOVE free (although I'm not sure if VMWare intend on charging for the Mac version once it's out of beta).

My first post using my new MacBook Pro

This post isn't really identity related (although one could argue that one's mobile phone and choice of notebook says a lot about one's personality and sense of identity, but I digress), but it is somewhat technology related.

So I decided to buy myself a Christmas present and went for the MacBook Pro 15-inch. And boy is it a powerful piece of technology: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz processor, 2GB RAM and ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics card with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM.

It is by far the best looking notebook on the market as you would expect from Apple. I considered other notebooks but ultimately went for the MacBook Pro because of the power and the looks. Of course, if it didn't contain an Intel chip and wasn't capable of booting up in Windows, I would never have considered it...not because I want to use Windows, but because I need Windows to play games. Games are also the reason I forked out the $$$s for this thing, otherwise the plain old MacBook (at half the price) would have been good enough.

So far, I'm quite impressed. Apart from having to get used to Mac OS X, it's really quite nice. I expected usability and I certainly got it. Initial setup was a breeze. No need for banging my head against the wall or trying to pull my hair out. It was a nice to have technology just work. The only annoying thing so far (and it really is just a little thing) is that the keyboard doesn't have the "End" key that takes you to the end of the line when you're typing. I use that quite often and not having it there is kinda bugging me. Maybe it's there and I need to hit some weird combo of the "apple key" and some other key. For now, I just have to use the mouse or the arrows to move me manually to the end of the line. Apart from that, (Ed Note: I finally found the "End" key. It's on there, I just didn't look closely enough. To use it, I have to use the "apple key" and the right arrow button together). I'll probably be using the Mac OS as my default environment and only use Windows whenever I REALLY have no other option. At this stage, I'm expecting this to only occur when I want to load up my games.

Apple's also made it relatively easy to help load Windows up on a Mac with their Boot Camp beta software...so at least I have a "Mac newbie" way of doing it.

As for why I needed a new notebook when I already had one (I actually had 2)...2 reasons:

• It's about time I had my own notebook to do my personal things on.
• I'm about to lose the 2 notebooks in a month or 2 because they are technically not mine. ie. They belong to the company I work for. So I would have been without a machine in the near future if I didn't take a proactive approach to things. Why will I be losing the work notebooks? You can probably guess...but more on that in due time.
  

Now...I guess I'd better go get that Windows XP CD...