I have a Mac at home, running Leopard OS-X. It has Bootcamp. I need to run Windows on the machine in order for my wife to remotely log into her servers at work.
Is this all I need:
Would getting this as well be worth it?
Thanks geeks!!
Umm… exactly WHY do you need to run Windows in order to remote-login to the servers at work?
What kind of servers are you trying to log into? What kind of apps is she trying to run?
I’ve recently switched to a Leopard-based MB Pro in a very, very windows-centric world. I’m easily able to (for example) mount Windows shared drives, use Notes for email, etc. without using Bootcamp OR Parallels.
There’s probably a way to access what you need without booting to a Windows OS.
I haven’t tried it, but I would go with Parallels, just to avoid having to reboot. A co-worker has been using the 2.mumble version here for a while, with no issues.
Oh, and you want XP Pro, not Home. IIRC, the Home version doesn’t have quite as much networking functionality available. I’m pretty sure you’ll still need a copy of XP to get Parallels working (it basically works by running XP as an app under OSX, or something like that).
But before you shell out the money, I’d look carefully at whether you need this at all to accomplish what you need. About the only thing I use my XP laptop for anymore is to run a big, hairy Excel macro that’s not portable to Excel Mac, and that’s only because I’m too cheap to shell out for Parallels.
I don’t like to mess with Windows at all, but Parallels is likely the best choice.
like the other guy said, how do you need to establish the connection to work?
I’m supposed to use remotedesktop but I don’t bother because its painfully slow (I just open terminals to my servers.)
What about something like this? http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx
I don’t really see why you would need to buy XP just to login. As for Home vs.Pro, I don’t see a point in spending money on a product msn is going to kill in a few months.
I connect to computers at work throuh VNC as well as Remote Desktop. Both have versions that will run OS X.
Does her work network have a VPN client for Mac?
If you really want to do VMs, I would go with VMWare. I’ve used Parallels and VMWare and find it to be better.
I also just use Microsoft’s own remote desktop connection (you can get from their website) and I can log on to my office Windows server just fine. It is a little slower than via boot camp, but not bad.