Much as we love our Macs, it is indeed a Windows world. The growth of market share in the Apple computing platform is still dwarfed by the massive volume of Windows PC hardware and software in the market.
We’d all rather stick with our OS X and Mac setups, I’m sure, with their clean looks and elegant usability, but every now and again one can come across a need that only a Windows machine can provide. It might be a website that only works with Internet Explorer. Or a game that is Windows only. Or a utility that has no Mac equivalent. Whatever it is, there may come a time when just being able to drop into Windows and run one program would be incredibly useful.
Thanks to the Intel heart in today’s Macs, this is fairly simple. Boot Camp or VMware Fusion let’s you do this with little trouble. But Fusion (or Parallels) cost money, and Windows iself is also expensive. What Mac user would want to drop down a few hundred dollars for an occasional Windows need?
Well, for the next few weeks, you can get Windows for free. You see, Microsoft has been striving to get the world to accept Windows Vista as a decent OS – but the world is not buying it. So, $10 million and one Jerry Sienfeld later, they’ve given up and gobe back to the drawing board. Windows 7 is the result, and it is everything Vista is not. It runs quickly, without requiring gobs of memory and a fast processor. It is not stuffed full of lame utilities. It does not ask the same security questions 15 times over. It even copies the Mac OS X dock functionality!
The beta of Windows 7 was launched for download the same week as Macworld Expo. Despite being a beta, it runs well and appears to be fairly complete. It is essentially Vista with a lot of the rubbish code rewritten for speed and stability, so most things that would run on Vista will run on 7 without complaint. The beta will operate until August of 2009, and you can download it direct (32-bit version) at
http://snipurl.com/win7betadd
and get a license key from Microsoft (by clicking the English download link and logging in with a free Live ID) at
http://snipurl.com/win7betakey
If you think this might be of interest, snag it fast – Microsoft have already kept it up for longer than was originally intended, and I expect it to disappear within the next couple of weeks.
Now, I have heard there are some driver issues with Boot Camp and Windows 7 at the moment, so I’d recommend virtualising it instead – it is more convenient for occasional use that way, anyway. No need to pay for the virtualisation software, though – Sun’s VirtualBox is free and Open Source. That can be downloaded from
http://snipurl.com/sunvbox
Finally, a step-by-step photo guide to getting Windows 7 up and running in VirtualBox on the Mac can be found here
http://snipurl.com/win7invboxguide
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