Wednesday May 28
 
19:35
 
PC On Mac On PC – II

I came into work today, set up the LG Mac, and got a bit of a shock: working Bluetooth PAN.

That made for a very happy day. I smiled and beamed as I surfed the net using Safari on Mac OS X, while sharing the connection to Windows XP via VMWare Fusion. I smiled and beamed even more as I hooked up a second LCD and found I could extend the desktop. With two displays, I could run full screen XP on one display and Mac OS X on the second display. Splendid.

The day of the virtual machine has really come. I now routinely run Mac OS X at home (on my iMac) with XP running in a virtual machine – and it is not even close to noticeable that XP is running on a simulated PC. There is no lag – no slowdown. I can burn even DVDs from XP using Nero with no issues. It’s nice.

Why bother? Well one thing I like is the separation of risk. My “life” is the Mac – it’s where I surf the internet, chat, listen to music, watch movies.

The virtual machine running XP is my sandbox. My Korean sandbox. It’s where I run all those Korean apps that don’t work on the Mac – such as the KTF app which lets me send and receive Korean SMS messages.

The great thing is that whatever I install under XP, it doesn’t affect the Mac at all. That may seem obvious – but it’s deeper than it first seems.

While XP bloats with background processes over time (especially from Korean websites) and there’s nothing you can do except try to manage it – now I can switch off everything XP related at the touch of a switch, just by closing down the virtual machine. When in a Windows only world, I sometimes wished there was a “switch off all the background crap” button. Now I have one.

Or if I want to try a new application I’ve downloaded from the internet, I can simply fire up a second XP session. I can try out the software and if I don’t like it, never install it on my main XP session. Less crap from installing and uninstalling over and over. Sure I could do that by having two XP installations on a PC rather than two virtual PC installations – but here I can have both running at the same time, drag and drop files between them, pause them. I can create new virtual machines easily, cloning from standard installs.

If I have a friend staying, I can give them their own XP virtual machine. When they want to use the computer, I simply full-screen that virtual machine – and they instantly have their own machine. I don’t need to worry about them accessing my personal data. They don’t need to worry about me accessing their personal data – we simply delete the machine when they are gone. I could even install XP in Korean or Japanese or whatever language so that they don’t have to struggle with English.

So I’m pleased to have this virtual world running on my LG Mac. I’ve tried running VMWare under XP, and it just doesn’t have the same fluidity and speed. On Mac OS X, it just works.

The only downside today? The “sleep” hack I found for the LG internal keyboard doesn’t seem very reliable – sometimes not waking from sleep, etc. Since I use a USB keyboard at work anyway, I’m happy to accept just leaving the internal keyboard and sleep alone.