A few days ago, I bought a new Mac Mini (it will be quite upsetting if Apple suddenly, in the next 2 weeks or so comes out with a new version!) for my kids to use.
Mitchell has been primarily using my old Powerbook so he’s already familiar with OS X and likes it (though most of that might be due to the small mouse that he really loves!).
Xander has been using an old Sony desktop so I thought this would be a great opportunity to get him familiar with OS X as well as being able to run Windows via VMWare’s Fusion.
First thing I realized is that I didn’t get enough memory for the system. Kathy is potentially getting that today so the system will get faster right away after install. It’s dog slow right now so it will make it much more usable.
Second, I have some issues with some of the Windows games he was using. VMWare’s Fusion has a video driver but it shows up as SVGA and with a limited set of features so not all games are happy with it. The games he generally plays are not super graphic intensive but they do have some needs. This is frustrating because I certainly don’t want to keep a Windows system AND a Mac system so that he can run games. This should just work. I guess there is an outside chance the memory increase might help since not all error message are truly accurate so maybe it is really telling me something other than the graphics won’t work – like inadequate memory.
Xander and Mitchell like the ability to see movie previews. The browsing has some hiccups but that is because parent control is set up and you have to add things as you go. Other than that, the web stuff he gets at (Club Penguin, Cartoon Network, …) seems to work now.
If I can solve the Windows issues, I will have a great solution. Now if I only had some time to work on this.