In this episode David and Katie discuss strategies and solutions for dealing with that *other* operating system.
Links of Interest
Mac Software
Windows Software
Outlook to Google Calendar Sync
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That would be NTFS for Mac Not NTSF:)
Good show. One thing I have to add to the file sharing section is the ability of Leopard and Snow Leopard to authenticate and work with Active Directory. Once you know how to do it, this is actually very easy to set up and works brilliantly. It allow access to all your Active Directory shares and at my school ironically works quicker than the vanilla XP machines on the network.
A great tutorial on how to set this up is found at:
http://alturl.com/cdbm
I commonly use Dropbox to sync content. It works brilliantly by syncing on my school XP box to my home folder on the Windows Server. As soon as I change anything in this folder the one XP machine I keep logged in with the client syncs everything back. I sit at the back of the classroom working in SMART Notebooks on my mac, save them and walk over to the XP machine and load them up. Simple and awesome.
Thanks for the Podcast guys.
Thanks, Katie and David, for addressing what I think is a very important and, sadly in my opinion, under-illuminated topic in many Mac podcasts: Windows on the Mac. As a recent switcher/slider, I would like to offer the following Fusion hints from my own experience (especially or mainly useful for slower Macs):
- Set up the VM on an external drive (strangely, it seems to run faster than on the internal hard-disk, even on my USB-only MB Air)
- Make sure there’s plenty of free space on the drive (Fusion seems to need lots of elbow-room); my VM started slowing down horribly when there was only 10 GB or so left.
- Allow only one core on dual-core machines
- Don’t give the VM too much RAM: 512 MB (but not much more) if you only have 2 GB of RAM
- Don’t use Fusion’s SnapShot feature; it seems to chew a lot of drive space and processing power (but that was maybe just my impression). Rather make complete copies of your VM (to which you can then easily roll back if your VM goes bad).
Keep up the great work!
Great show! My solution for keeping sensitive files using Dropbox is to create a sparse image (mac only of course—-at least I’m pretty sure it is) called Encrypted which I mount as needed.
Really great podcast! I’ve gotten hooked now on eliminating the “ding.” I still let Mail.app alert me but after the first or second podcast I removed it from my phone. I’m no longer a slave to every..single..time work email vibrates. I check it when I check it. I’m MUCH happier now!
Also glad I finally gave in to the Dropbox recommendation. I’m using it with 1Password and it’s working spectacularly. I’m really curious to see about TextExpander and Breevy.
Really enjoyed the show, I bought a Mac after listening to your first few shows a I am an absolute convert, but still use PC at work, it is really great having dropbox & 1Password on both platforms really made a great deal of difference. I am also looking forward to trying Breevy. If that works as well as the other two programs it will be amazing. Thanks so much and keep up the excellent work!
I am using a 2007 Macbook Pro with Tiger running a Windows 7 vitual machine (using Sun’s Virtual Box) to enable me to use the companies SAGE 200 software for sales order processing. I have no issues with this set up and although the IT guys have no idea about Mac’s, I seem to get by. Good episode.
Thanks for the show. Just thought I’d correct a couple of points.
1) Remote Desktop is not VNC. They are two completely different solutions.
2) Your coverage of connecting to exchange using Mail.app was over simplified.
a) Mail.app does not support MAPI (the native exchange/outlook protocol)
b) You’ll need to have Outlook Web Access enabled on the server for this to work.
3) There are malicious programs that can “jump” from your VM to your mac. They are not “viruses” but they are malicious. Typically they use MS Office Documents (with Macros) or Adobe Products (Flash, Shockwave, and/or Acrobat) as a vector.
Good show, being yet another of the drove of switchers/sliders who now have Mac’s at home and Windows at work it brought up a lot close to me.
Never used Bootcamp since I found virtualization was always good enough. As a developer running Visual Studio I have been able to do work at home just find. I have also used both VMWare Fusion and Parallels and concur they are both great products. Though I would say that Parallels has the edge still and speed tests comparing the two confirm this.
After 2 years on the Mac after using Windows since 2.0 and DOS before that I have found that I pretty much never run windows for anything but work. There are no Windows programs that I did not find a better and more capable Mac version of.
Though one annoyance for switchers is common keyboard shortcuts. Sure you can map the Mac keyboard to work like Windows – but I found I much preferred the Mac shortcuts for cut/copy/paste which requires less finger stretching. So what I did was map the Left Alt key on my work machine to Ctrl. So I keep the exact same shortcut without having to think about it.
Dropbox is great for synching – that is unless your IT department blocks it like so many do.
About partitioning…
1) Cutting off 30% of your hard drive from your backup so you can easily run your backup program is not a good reason to partition. Dealing with partitioning might add back the same amount of work. Your clone drive simply needs to be equal or bigger. Don’t do extra work to save $50 for a real drive. People do this so they can get away with using old (and soon to die) hard drives as backup!
2) If you need speed, don’t do a RAID-0 with partitions, using the outter faster half of your drive. Get an SSD drive.
3) If you need to do bootcamp, fine. That’s an OK reason to partition, but I still feel sorry for you.
Your time is precious. Say no to partitioning.
I would like to expand on what GC Williams said about RDC vs VNC. To authenticate, RDC uses standard Windows authentication. In other words, if you can log into the physical machine, you can log in using RDC. If you are currently logged in at the physical machine, you take over that session. If nobody is logged in, then you then become the logged in user. If somebody else is logged in, then you need administrative rights to terminate their session. There is also a Windows remote desktop, which I’ve had occasion to use as well.
In contrast, VNC just lets you share the screen of someone else. if you know the VNC password (no user name needed, and defaults to no password), you can gain control of the computer no matter who is logged in. I think it is also possible to set up VNC access in such a way that it does not announce (to the person sitting at the computer) that a VNC session is active. I’ve heard that many companies block VNC at the firewall level for these reasons. I would not recommend anyone use VNC unless RDC (or another solution) did not fit the bill.
I would also like to mention that while Microsoft’s RDC is a good option, I think a better option is CoRD. It has a nice side drawer that lets you see all of the various computers that you’ve set up (double click to start a connection). It lets you log in to more than one PC more easily than RDC does. Changing setups later (when passwords change) is also much easier.
More on partitioning.
I do it for performance to force my fast access data to be at the edge of the hard disk.
I guess this is getting pretty serious about performance at this stage.
http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-WhyYouNeedMoreThanYouNeed.html
I run a 320gb 7200rpm drive in my macbook with a 32gb partition for snow leopard which also holds my 10gb xp vm for fusion (runs around 10gb free).
The rest of the data is on another partition i.e. itunes/photos/downloads/encrypted drives.
I use a script for SuperDuper to clone the partitions in one hit (so one runs after the other) to my now pgp encrypted hard drives (Thanks Dave!)
Great podcast, keep them coming.
Team,
Thanks for sorting me out on the finer points of RDC and VNC. For the record I knew it was NTFS and have no clue why I said NTSF repeatedly. I suspect it was because I was podcasting about Windows and that gave me the willies. I’ll make sure to follow up on these items in the next show.
David
Enjoyed the episode as always.
Awesome tip on Breevy and other Windows TextExpander alternatives!
Another related technology to keep an eye on is from a company called AquaConnect (www.aquaconnect.net). There are several great options for Mac->PC RDP, but I haven’t been able to find any good PC->Mac remote desktop solutions. (To clarify, there are options like VNC, GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, etc. that are very good for ad hoc access, but I don’t find them suitable to use for extended work sessions like I am able to do with RDP from a Mac to a PC.)
AquaConnect has licensed the RDP protocol and is going to be releasing a product that will let you use any RDP client (Windows, Linux, iPad, etc.) to connect to your Mac remotely over RDP. I saw a demo of this at an event last week (including iPad), and it looks fantastic. Beta is supposed to be coming soon.
They are already shipping an enterprise product that lets you do the equivilent of Terminal Services/Citrix (multiple user concurrent user sessions on one machine) on a Snow Leopard server. Extremely cool, but too expensive/overkill for what I (and probably most of your listeners) need. Forthcoming Mac Remote Desktop product is for 1:1 connections and will presumably be much less expensive.
Just a friendly warning to people looking into Parallels. The tech support is the worse I’ve ever encountered for an application. Googling Parallels tech support should reveal many complaints that go unanswered for long periods. Don’t expect the quality tech support that other Mac companies provide (e.g. Agile, SmileOnMyMac, etc). To make matters worse, Parallels is a very complex system and there are many points that can go wrong. The free alternative, VirtualBox, has no tech support however my questions were answered more quickly and satisfactorily by users in their forums. Suggestion: Try VirtualBox first, then try Fusion, then try Parallels.
I second Durbrow’s warning about the Parallels tech support. Here’s what happened to me:
I originally bought a boxed copy of Parallels desktop 2 and ran it just fine on my MacBook. Then some months later I get an e-mail from them saying “hey, there’s an update available, go get it here! All existing license keys will work!”. So naturally I go and download it. After installing the update I need to activate it using my license key – which does not work! At this point I send e-mail to Parallels support asking for help. After three days of radio silence, I finally find out that some mastermind at Parallels had put both of his or her braincells to work and decided that the license keys are different for boxed and downloaded versions, even though it’s the same piece of software! So I had to uninstall Parallels, reinstall the boxed version and update it using the built-in update checker. After that I went through that fateful e-mail in detail to see whether this incompatibility was mentioned somewhere. It wasn’t. There was only the assurance that _all_ existing license keys will work. I wrote to Parallels support to complain about this whole episode (they first urge me to break my installation and don’t even bother to provide help when a paying customer contacts them), but I wasn’t surprised that this, too, was ignored by them. So I wouldn’t count too much on getting any support from Parallels should you need any.
Nowadays I’m a happy VMware Fusion camper. Fusion also has the added benefit of having a proper support for non-Windows virtual machines as well.
Great show! Thought I would share, I was not able to use my macbook pro to use for work until I upgraded to snow leopard, I needed the Cisco VPN client to login. Also I needed the ability to run windows only apps. I installed WINE, and have had no issues works great and I did not have to install Windows XP.
Great show! As a gamer I’ve found that bootcamp is the only realistic solution for playing games. Both Fusion and Parallels claim to run games, and claim to have great graphics support, but even slightly older games that I play won’t even run (like The Witcher, and Fallout 3). So bootcamp is the best option.
For work however, I need windows too, and Fusion (or Parallels) is a better solution since I can do many things on the mac side, and only use Windows when I have too. But I didn’t want to waste even more drive space.
The solution for me was to point Fusion at my bootcamp partition rather than creating another windows partition. That way I don’t end up wasting even more disk space for windows (and also save myself the license cost for yet another copy of windows). It’s a great feature of both Fusion and Parallels.
@Ben Delat – There are several sites showing pretty resource intensive games running on both Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Parallels always out performs VMWare in those that I’ve seen. Also, I tend to prefer using CrossOver for gaming and Productivity apps. It’s so good that when my Mac Steam client kept crashing I just used the windows version under CrossOver to play CounterStrike, Portal and Team Fortress 2
just my $0.02
I agree with @Ben. I had the same experience as he did trying to get Fallout 3 working in VMWare. Gaming is just too hit and miss.
Using windows in a non-boot camp partition (just the image) is the most convenient way to run windows, but even if 90% of your games run, you can’t run all your games unless you dual boot at least for those 10% (and load the partition in vmware for the other 90%)