Sacrilege! For some people the mere idea of installing and running Windows on a Macintosh computer is tantamount to heresy, but for the rest of us there are occasions when we may need to run a piece of Windows software on our pristine Macbook. In these cases there are several ways to get the job done, all without harming the Mac's operating system in any way. Best of all, if you already have a copy of Windows you can get it up and running on a Mac for free.
The Two Main Ways To Run Windows on a Mac
There are two basic ways to run Windows on a Macintosh computer: hardware or software. The hardware option is already built into modern Macs in the form of Boot Camp. Boot Camp is a tool included with OS 10.5 that allows the user to create a Windows partition on the hard drive, install Windows onto it, and then choose at startup whether to load the Mac OS or the Windows OS. Only one operating system can run at a time and switching back and forth between the two requires a complete system restart. For this reason, those that need to run Windows only occasionally may prefer to use the second option, software emulation.
The second way to run Windows on a Macintosh computer is to use a software emulator. Programs such as Parallels and VirtualBox set up a virtual PC that runs inside of the Macintosh operating system. The wonderful thing about this approach is that the copy of Windows runs in its own protected space. If it somehow becomes infected with a virus or damaged in some other way it can quickly and easily be reset to it's default settings. The down side to running Windows in a virtual environment is speed. Running a computer within a computer means that everything done on the virtual system will probably take longer to execute and process. Plus, the emulated video cards and other emulated hardware will likely provide less than stellar performance. In other words, running Windows in a virtual PC environment on a Mac is not going to allow the user to play high end PC games because the graphics and fluidity of the game will be much poorer than if it was running on a native Windows PC.
