---
title: "Adventures in Mac/Windows Wonkery"
url: https://campbell-online.com/blog/2006/06/25/adventures-in-macwindows-wonkery/
description: "Well, I must say I’m enjoying the new MacBook. I still have a need to run a few Windows programs (Visio, Project), and so for the first few days this week I experimented."
published: 2006-06-25
updated: 2006-06-25
---

# Adventures in Mac/Windows Wonkery

Published 2006-06-25

June 25, 2006 · [Tools and techniques](https://campbell-online.com/blog/category/tools-and-techniques/)

Well, I must say I’m enjoying [the new MacBook](http://enrevanche.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-bad-was-it.html). I still have a need to run a few Windows programs (Visio, Project), and so for the first few days this week I experimented with [Apple’s BootCamp](http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/). This is a perfectly satisfactory solution, as long as you don’t mind shutting down and rebooting whenever you need to access something in Windows.

But when I ramped up the MacBook’s RAM this week to 2GB (thanks, [Small Dog Electronics](http://smalldog.com) — $225 with shipping is a much better deal than the $500 that Apple charges for the identical sticks of memory), I had enough overhead to play with virtual machines.

So I downloaded and installed [Parallels Desktop](http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/) (just formally released; on sale for $49 through July.) Parallels allows you to run Windows XP (or any Windows OS, or Linux, or pretty much anything that runs on an Intel chip) in a window on your Mac, while your other Mac software putters along happily. Does it work? Yes, it does:

A new Outlook on Macintosh computing

That’s Windows XP in a Mac window, with Windows Outlook downloading my company e-mail and showing my calendar for the week. The performance is admittedly much less snappy than BootCamp, which is, after all, running Windows natively on a fast Intel processor.

But it’s perfectly adequate for occasionally starting up XP and tweaking a Visio document or a Project plan, and as I get a little better at adjusting the settings to find the configuration’s “sweet spot,” it is improving all the time.

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