10/24/2021 0 Comments Good Security For Mac Running Windows
Apple pitches it as the way to run "specialty software." You know, "that one Windows application. That's a big selling point for Apple, which gives this feature a marquee position on its "Why You'll Love a Mac" page. Windows and Mac OS are very different operating systems in terms of their underlying code with modern versions of Windows-based on the Windows NT kernel and Mac OS instead based on UNIX.You can run Windows on a Mac. Worldwide just over three-quarters of desktop computers run some variant of Microsoft Windows, with Mac OS 10 a very distant second at just over 10 market share.
![]() Good Security Running Windows Full Packaged ProductOEM copies are allowed only on new physical hardware.) At the Microsoft Store, that shrink-wrapped product costs $300. (Upgrades are only allowed if you are replacing the installed copy of OS X or a previous version of Windows installed in a VM. Windows 7 Professional $250 Under Windows license terms, the only option a normal consumer has for Windows 7 in a VM on a Mac is what's called a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license. And if your can't-live-without it Windows app is Microsoft Office or an accounting program or a point-of-sale system, well, you have to pay for that too. In this post I discuss both.You can pay for virtualization software or find a free alternative, but Windows itself isn't free. Before you try it, though, you should learn about the costs-some of them not so obvious at first glance.There's the monetary cost of software, of course, but there are also some hidden performance costs. VirtualBox is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. I've been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-$60 range. A full license for either one costs $80. Virtualization software $0-80 I've been testing VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac. I have Windows running in Boot Camp and in multiple virtual machines.In addition, I collected performance information from my colleagues Zach Whittaker and Christopher Dawson, both of whom have new MacBook Airs running Windows on the side.I was shocked at the differences in performance. The latter two pieces of the puzzle are recent upgrades, with the disk being a substantial improvement over the original sluggish 5400 RPM drive. You can look at the five numbers that make up the Windows Experience Index (WEI), but the detailed numbers are much more illuminating.I looked at these numbers on my late-2009 Mac Mini, with a decent Core 2 Duo CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 7200RPM Seagate Momentus XT hybrid disk. To measure performance, I looked at the raw data that Windows captures when you run the Windows System Assessment tool (WinSAT.exe). It's at least $300 if you use commercial virtualization software, and possibly much more if you need to pay for additional licenses for Windows apps.What I found even more interesting was the decrease in performance that you get when you run Windows on Apple hardware. ![]() For those two tasks, you're essentially losing half of the CPU by running in a VM. On my system, the Boot Camp installation scored 308 MB/s for the CPUCompression2Metric and 470.9 MB/s for the Encryption2Metric, versus 152.5 and 223.0 for the same metric under Parallels. For the optimized setup, I increased RAM to 3 or 4 GB.You can see at a glance that virtualization takes a significant chunk of CPU capability away. Google maps update for macLook at the difference in performance on the Mac Mini, where the WEI score goes from 5.9 to 6.9. The lower scores reflect the differences accuratelySurprisingly, one area of Windows performance actually improves dramatically in a virtual machine. All of those effects are smooth when running under Boot Camp, but I can see tearing and jerky movements in a virtual machine. Both VMware and Parallels have decent drivers capable of delivering Aero support with transparency and other effects. ![]() By contrast, virtualizing Windows unlocks the full disk speed, especially with SSDs, but you pay a penalty in CPU and graphics muscle. The SATA III SSD in the Dell desktop I'm using to write this post scores 209.2 MB/s.The moral? No matter which way you run Windows on a Mac, you're going to give something up If you use Boot Camp, Windows will probably get as much as it can from the CPU and graphics adapter, but you'll pay a performance penalty in terms of hard disk speed. By way of contrast, a Samsung SSD in a 2009-vintage Dell notebook earned 130.2 MB/s on that score.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorRegenald ArchivesCategories |