Switching to a Mac, Part 2: Parallels
The Mac arrived two days early, on Monday morning. Not that I’m complaining, but it completely destroyed a well-planned day. And the next well-planned day. I am now playing catch-up.
I think I’m about switched from the PC to the Mac. Not quite – I’ll still be poking around, tweaking, but I’m pretty darned close.
It’s not as easy as those commercials make it sound. At least, not if you’re a power user on your PC. Sure, my mom could seamlessly switch from a PC to the Mac – it wouldn’t even cause a speedbump. For me, it was a bit of chaos.
My first problem centered around Parallels, which is the virtual machine software I picked up to run Windows. Until Microsoft develops OneNote for the Mac, I need it. It functions as my own personal wiki and I have two years worth of notes easily organized in OneNote. So I installed Parallels.
And then I installed a copy of Windows XP I happen to own, from circa 2003 I think, or just before SP2 was released. That’s when everything started to go downhill.
My whole computer slowed down to molasses. It was awful. Well, I thought, I’ve got 2 DIMM memory sticks sitting here. So I upgraded the MacBook Pro memory from 2GB to 4GB. That was an experience in itself, and took me three times to get it to work. I don’t blame the Mac though – I should never be allowed to modify hardware. I’m accident prone.
With 4GB of memory, I was still running amazingly slow. Not only that, every time I tried to download SP2 from Windows, the virtual machine crashed, followed by the entire machine. Over the course of 3 hours I rebooted the entire Mac more than 6 times. I was really frustrated.
I turned to Twitter for Tech Support and recieved amazing troubleshooting. First off, I installed iStat, which is a nice widget that lets you know what’s going on with your CPUs.
That didn’t enlighten me though. Next I checked the Parallels web site and found that Leopard users should install a certain build. Why that build isn’t in the box, I have no idea, but I re-installed Parallels. Then I downloaded, outside of Windows, the SP2 file from Windows Update. I tried again, but everything still crashed. On the advice of the Twitterati, I deleted the entire virtual machine and started over. I re-installed Windows. Egads! Once Windows was re-installed and Parallels tools were installed, I installed the local version of SP2.
Everything worked. It took 3 hours and tons of Twitter tech support, but everything started to work.
Now I’m actually a little freaked out to open Parallels, as I’m afraid it might crash. I’ll need my OneNote notes sooner or later though, so I’ll have to get past it.
Tomorrow, my adventures in extending Mail.app so that it’s a useful productivity tool and doesn’t frustrate me.
Related:
Switching to a Mac, Part 1
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Find Michelle Lentz here at Write Technology, on bub.blicio.us, on Twitter, or Pownce.
john busteed
June 18th, 2008 at 1:23 pm #
I always pay attention to how an application stores my data. If you had stored your notes in a real wiki, they would be in either html or more likely xml.
Trusting your intellectual property to Microsoft is fraught with danger.
Stephen Downes
June 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm #
Interesting. I installed Parallels in OSX Tiger and didn’t notice the same sort of slowdown.
Across the board, Leopard seems to be a less reliable OS than Tiger.