Running OS X and Windows at the same time

Sun, 3 December 2006

Ever wanted to run Internet Explorer on Mac OS X? Or maybe Microsoft Word, Excel, FrontPage? Guess what, you can now. Well, sort of.

The new Parallels desktop lets you use a tool called Coherence, it runs Windows in the background, but lets you use Windows applications in the foreground.

When you start Parallels and bot Windows, click on Coherence tool and it will neatly ‘integrate’ your Windows application into your OS X desktop. One thing that looks ugly is the Windows task bar, sitting just above the dock, but there’s a cure for this, too.

coherence.jpg

Jasenko suggested to tell Windows to auto hide the task bar, and move the OS X Dock to the right, this way everything looks better.

The best is, the Parallels Desktop lets you switch between two applications on two different operating systems, just like any two applications on one o/s.

But this is where things get really interesting. You can log into the OS X, open Parallels and then boot the Windows installation from another partition, the one you created with the BootCamp.

This makes running Windows and OS X at the same time one whole step closer, something I have predicted to be a ‘Big secret’ in my earlier article MacWorld San Francisco 2007 prediction.

I know, it’s only virtualisation, but think of it this way; BootCamp loads at the base of the boot process, defines partitions and decides what OS to load. Once OS X has loaded, an application within OS X (Parallels) boots another OS from another partition and lets its application run on host OS desktop.

Apple now has dual core processors in all their computers. All they need to do is; enable BootCamp to control processor, that is - let it assign one core to each operating system, then boot OS X and let it allocate memory and manage devices availability, then boot Windows.

I think we are close to switching between operating systems just like we are switching today between user accounts, or maybe even between applications.

[tags]OS X, BootCamp, Parallels, Windows, MacWorld, IE7 on Mac [/tags]

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One Response to “Running OS X and Windows at the same time”

  1. John F. said: Sat, 17 February 2007 at 19:51

    Interesting post, strange lead-in… Macs have been running Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Excel, and — I believe — FrontPage since OS 9. Surely you meant some other Microsoft-bound program?

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