Glenn's Daily Script » Windows

Vista and Fusion

Glenn — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:36:12 +0000

I’ve just setup up a new virtual machine under VMWare’s Fusion. Since Kathy has been having good luck with Vista, I decided to take the plunge too and used Vista SP1 for this new virtual machine.

My purpose for this installation is to run a few simple programs that I have yet to shed myself of.

1) MS Money is what Kathy and I use to manage both our daily money and validate and sanity check our financial planners work. If I found something that could replace it on OS X, I probably would at least for the long term planning work. NOTE: If there is anyone out there using something that might work, let me know.

2) Alarm programming and control using HAI’s software only works under Windows. This is not likely to change.

3) UPB home automation software, like UPBStart, is currently only Windows compatible. This could change though maybe not. People have to have a motivation and mostly that is about making money so I’m not sure OS X is a target market for home automation.

4) I’m the treasurer for our kids’ school’s PTSA and so I use Quick Books. I could go to a OS X version but Intuit does a lousy job for transferring the files between OS X and Windows. Also, after I serve my second year, the replacement would likely be using Windows so keeping it there makes sense.

I’d go nearly instantly to OS X versions for the first 3. Maybe someday!

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Vista and Fusion

VMWare’s Fusion

Glenn — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:45:32 +0000

In using VMWare’s Fusion (and before that Parallels), I have been using a Boot Camp partition but only because I had initially set up a Boot Camp partition. I think I kept it because I thought to myself if there was some compatibility issues, I could just boot into Boot Camp and run the s/w that didn’t work but I never did it because everything just worked (for me at least though I have heard of other stuff not working).

Anyway, a Boot Camp partition is something that needs to have a separate backup strategy where a virtual partition for VMWare’s Fusion (or Parallels) will get backed up by Time Machine or SuperDuper! which are my backup solutions of choice. The virtual partition just seems simpler.

I will have to try this and verify it over time and see that I can get this to work and even restore if necessary. If anyone has comments on this setup, let me know.

OS X vs Windows

Glenn — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:31:27 +0000

As a OS X user and recent switcher, I’ve found lots of things to like about OS X. Applications install simpler. Lot’s of built in features. Usability and security are more integrated and easier to use in a way that I don’t have to think about things – just do them.

There are a few things that don’t work as well though. Uninstalling applications require external tools. I’ve found networking to be more complex though this may be because I’m trying to talk to Windows machines and if you were just talking to other OS X machines it may be simple.

One thing that many old time OS X users just gloss over though is that there is a lot of maintenance that makes the system perform well. Many of these maintenance items are made easier by using external apps like Onyx. Also some of the maintenance items are bad if done too often and bad if not done often enough. Also, you should do them after certain tasks (installing certain items like system updates).

These maintenance items are neither worse nor better than Windows but knowing that you need to do this changes the perspective on the overall system. Windows has lots of things that are good to do once in a while to that improve stability and performance but mostly, tech or geeks are the only people who know to do them. That’s why I put OS X on par with Windows for this point.

Of course, I’m still using OS X and that says a lot. I like the OS and I like the boxes that Apple makes. There are issues but I think that they are less than I get with other systems – at least for now.