Taking Control of Running Windows on a Mac
Company: TidBITS Electronic Publishing
Price: $10
www.takecontrolbooks.com
In May of 2006 David Every of MyMac reviewed Joe Kissell’s ebook, Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac, and determined that in his view it was the best book so far for the average Mac user who wants to jump into the world of running PC applications.
Now the book has been updated in a second edition, bringing it up to date with the latest developments in Apple’s Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and the Q emulator.
The Taking Control series has a very readable style, and the author adopts a step-by-step approach to all aspects of running Windows – starting with why you might want to run Windows in the first place, and then which method might be most appropriate – virtualisation with Parallels, emulation with Q or full PC mode with Boot Camp. There is a single page on Virtual PC for PowerPC Macintoshes, but really the focus is on the Intel Mac platform.
Installation and configuration of the system and Windows itself is also covered in detail, and the various idiosyncrasies and considerations that come along with running in the Windows world as opposed to the less risky and more straightforward Macintosh OS X environment.
The second edition update covers the latest version of Boot Camp, which has slightly more advanced capabilities than the original version, and also what is going on with the free Q emulator. There is also a comprehensive discussion of the latest beta version of Parallels – which has some unique abilities: for instance, it can run a Boot Camp partition as a virtual environment with OS X, and can also use a special ‘Coherence’ mode to make Windows applications appear to be running natively on Mac OS X, as well as take an installation of Windows Vista.
The rise of the Intel Macintosh and the large number of Windows switchers migrating to the Mac platform have made the area of Windows operation on Macs one of the fastest moving areas of development on the platform. As such, despite only being updated in December, the second edition is already slightly out of date – the version of Parallels discussed just came out of beta into a final release, for example. However, the fundamentals are still comprehensively covered, and if you are new to Mac/Windows interoperability then Joe Kissell has got you covered.
To cap it all, the $10 coupon reduction on a new copy of Parallels is still included – making the book effectively free if you take up that option! I have no hesitation in heartily recommending Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac by Joe Kissell to any reader who is interested in making use of the Windows capabilities of their Intel Macintosh.
MyMac.com Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.