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Apple MacOS on Windows PC using VMWare Player


Yes, dear Readers this is a screenshot of Apple Mac OS 10.5.5 running on a PC laptop using Windows XP Service Pack 3 with 3.048GB of RAM and Core Duo 2 Intel P8600 CPU @ 2.40GHz plus the latest VMWare Player 3.1.3[the player inthe VM uses 2GB of the 3GB of RAM]. The how-to can be found here. The experience is decidedly mixed.

The boot up time of the virtual machine is between 3 and 5 minutes. The response time of various apps like Calendar, QuickTime, Safari and Word was reasonable except for larger media or image files. This post is being written on the Mac OS using WordPress in Safari. The response time has been very good – but that is Ajax in action. Likewise, the response time within specific applications has been reasonably quick with occasional delay in game penalties particularly in Word.

But across the virtual machines communication has been more problematic. Cut and paste operations, even for text, does not work. Ditto, no go for drag and drop across the two OS environs. Likewise, Windows Explorer cannot see Mac OS Finder and its associated files [or at least I have yet to figure how to communicate files across the boundary]. And that is the last observation – do expect to do a lot of reading and searching around for helpon how to operate and manage the VMWare Player [or VMware Workstation if you have that]. Yes, its all there, you just have to track it down. For example, one can spend long periods of time trying to track down how to get a full screen display of the MacOS window operating properly. But this is only after 3 days of trying to get the system operating properly. In sum, MacOS running in Windows is not bad, promising, and worthy of more time and effort.

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