Voila

Using some time before a night shift the other day I installed Parallels Desktop for Mac, took about 15 minutes. Next, I installed Windows XP Home SP2, about 20 minutes. Voilà, incredibly fast virtualization of Windows on a Mac.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.0 running in Parallels:

Apple’s Safari:

Subsequently, I’ve installed several other “Windows” applications into the Parallels virtualization with incredible speed in performance and zero problems (including specialized legal practice software). No problems taking an external hard drive from my old Dell box and connecting by USB to the Mac—it appears as drive D in Windows.

Several years ago I decided to center my document management strategy on well established file formats, specifically: TXT, RTF, DOC, XLS, HTML, XML, CSV, and PDF (not forgetting the universal image, audio, and video formats—no worries). The advantages are: almost guranteed long-term viability and cross-platform support. Essentially the only format that I use, that is highly propiertary, is the PST file format for Microsoft’s Outlook (8 years-worth of PST files). Now I can access all those PST files using Parallels runing Microsoft Outlook on a Mac.