November 9, 2007

I've named my new MacBook Pro "Captain Peachfuzz" in keeping with the Rocky and Bullwinkle theme. Wednesday I turned the Captain into a dual boot machine. The original plan was to use BootCamp (which now comes with Leopard) to repartition the machine and install Windows XP. This would give me a machine that I would boot into one or the other OS.

After talking with my buddy Mike I decided that I wouldn't mind having both OS's available at the same time. A little research showed that Parallels Desktop 3.0 can load XP into a virtual machine from the BootCamp partition. So I downloaded and installed Parallel Desktop and there was Windows XP running as a virtual machine along side OS X. I haven't benchmarked it yet but it hasn't been slow for the limited stuff I've done.

There is one gotcha when using both BootCamp and Parallels. I put in the activation code under the BootCamp Windows which is using the whole machine and both cores. When I brought up the Parallels version Windows wants you to reactivate because the hardware/memory have changed significantly. So before you go even try to launch Windows under Parallels you will want to boot it with BootCamp and create a copy of the hardware profile and set up Windows to prompt for which profile you want to use. I cleverly named my two profiles BootCamp and Parallels. There is a good forum article at the Parallel's web site explaining the steps you should take [Link]. Now when windows starts it pauses early in the boot and asks which profile to load. Choose the right one grasshopper and everything is good.

I some how messed it up so my Parallels Activation failed but I called into Microsoft's robotic Activation center and got the profile activated in about six minutes and am now a happy camper. Now I just need to go out and find some Virus software because even if it running on an Apple Windows XP is Windows XP and vunerable to all sorts of nastyness.

By the way if you purchase your copy of Parallel Desktop 3.0 from the site before November 13th, 2007 they will send you a $25 Apple Gift Card which makes the software a quite affordable $54.00 eventually.