Jules Says

Installing Vista on a Mac: finally, all systems go

At long last, I'm running Vista on my MacBookPro. My previous posts about installing windows (part 1 and part 2) and  installing Vista described a disastrous and ultimately failed attempts to install Vista Home Premium on my iMac. The short answer: if you're running Parallels Desktop for Mac, the only Vista that will work is the big, fat, most-overpriced Ultimate version. Don't even think about using the upgrade model.

So I reluctantly sprung for yet another copy of Windows. As if there weren't already enough flavors of Windows Vista (there are 7, not including upgrade versions), I opened the clumsy packaging to find I have to choose between two install discs - 32-bit and 64-bit. Since I have a brand new beefy MacBookPro and the latest rev of Parallels, I went ahead and assumed I could use the 64-bit install disc. Yes, I should've checked first. I don't remember the error, but my Mac wasn't one bit happy with it. I barely got into setup, had a nasty crash that seemed to even affect Parallels. I didn't even bother looking up what might have gone wrong. I just reinstalled Parallels and used the 32-bit disc. It installed without a hitch. Given my track record, getting Windows installed on the second try is pretty good.

Why Parallels thinks I have a floppy drive, I don't know. It's running fine on 512MB of RAM, which is way less than it takes to run it on a PC. Gotta love that :)

My quickie review of Vista - it's slow. It's really testy - it asks permission for everything, often several times while installing a single piece of software. I don't know who said this - I'd love to attribute this quote to the orinator... "Vista is XP in a skirt."

Here's a screen shot (click to enlarge to 1440 x 900) of my MacBookPro running Parallels in coherence mode. Coherence mode lets me run windows and mac programs side by side without having to deal with the windows desktop. My Mac doc runs along the left side and the Windows task bar along the bottom. (this is my preference - you can leave your doc at the bottom - it'll run below the Windows task bar.) I'm running VPchat (Windows only), Adium (Mac only) and Twitterific (Mac only).

Yes, I named my Vista virtual OS Parasite Rex, after the most excellent book of the same name. Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures - it's fascinating, extremely readable science.

Switch to Mac: keep control of your cursor

My short list of complaints after switching back to Mac included the following:

I can't reliably tab my way to pop-up menus. I can never do it in Firefox - I can occasionally do it in Safari. I'm used to rapidly filling out forms without moving my hands from the keyboard, but I nearly always have to go back and manually select the "state", and any other pop-ups.

No more! There's a very simple fix - why it's not the default, I don't know. Simply go to System Preferences and select Keyboard & Mouse. At the bottom of the Keyboard Shortcuts window, select the All Controls radio button. This will give cursor focus back to you for those popup and pulldown menus.

Mac sync magic

Wow, I can't believe I just now discovered this. It's easy - no-brainer easy - to sync your iCal, Contacts, Mail (all accounts & rules), Keychains, and Safari Bookmarks across multiple computers.

Let me back up. I've worked on multiple computers for years. I've always had the problem of certain info living on a desktop computer at home, and different info on my laptop. Email was the worst. Getting mail on both and leaving/deleting from the server from the other is far to cumbersome with any significant mail volume. Back in my PC days, I was never able to get iMap to work for email. I tried numerous times, as did our netops guy, all to no avail. For awhile I was fine using GoToMyPC, which essentially let me work on my desktop remotely from any other computer, even a Mac. (Sadly, they don't have a client for accessing a Mac, but I highly recommend it to all you PC folks).

Then I switched back to Mac. No more remote access. Vine Server is simply too unreliable for me. I guess I've been afraid to try iMap on the Mac - I just didn't want to go through what I went through in the past trying to get it to work. I keep running up against the fact that despite several months back in the Mac world, I still don't expect things on my computer to work as they should. I bumped up against this the other day when I had messed up my font folder. I called several Mac nerd companies looking for immediate help. Finally one of them said "Have you called Apple?". Doh! I simply am not used to thinking that the makers of my system software are available to help me. I even have an AppleCare plan and I still forgot. I called. They fixed my problem in 5 minutes.

But back to iMap. I went upstairs. First I tried to change my existing mailboxes to iMap. No go - I had to set up new mailboxes. I did so. It worked. I came out to my patio and did the same thing. It worked. Then I discovered the little option at the bottom of the mail preferences window: Synchronize with other computers using .Mac. I did so. It worked. I ran back upstairs and did the same thing. It worked!

There was one surprisingly cryptic dialog message along the way - I got this for several sync operations. I was really surprised - I rarely encounter poorly-written dialog boxes in Mac software. Or am I being blinded by the light?

30 minutes after deciding to tackle iMap, I not only can now get my mail on either computer without losing it on the other, I have access to all my appointments and contacts, so I can sync with my Treo (using The Missing Sync) while I'm out of town :)

I'm having one of those "I'm so glad to be back on a Mac" days.

When technology bites back

So there I sat Friday morning, an hour away from an online meeting, surrounded by 5 robust computers, unable to do anything I needed, ready to tear my hair out. Some of the problems I brought on myself, some were beyond my control.

My first mistake was trying to do a shortcut installation of a CD full of fonts the night before. On my MacBook Pro, I was gradually, painstakingly installing them in Fontbook one at a time. But on my desktop Mac I tried to take a shortcut and copy a ton of folders directly into the Font folder. The fonts seemed to work fine in Fireworks and Dreamweaver, but when I tried to open Word, I got a popup window telling me about a corrupt font. I clicked "Ok" (the only option) and up popped another one. When I realized this was going to happen for each of the thousands of fonts I had copied, I forced Word to quit. "Crap, gotta deal with that soon," I thought, and used a different word processor.

The next morning, an hour before my meeting, I went to open the Powerpoint presentation I'd need to reference in the meeting. The same thing happened - I wasn't going to be opening the presentation on my iMac. Unfortunately, I don't have Office on my laptop Mac, so I was going to have to turn to one of the PCs. I booted up the nearest one, and turned back to my iMac to see if I could solve the font problem. After several minutes I realized the PC wasn't booting. It was trying - over, and over, and over. The reset button was stuck, and it was booting over and over, never quite making it. No time to mess with that - I moved onto the next PC. It booted fine, but the wireless keyboard batteries were apparently dead. I ran downstairs to scrounge for batteries. Couldn't find any. Did I think to grab a wired keyboard from a different PC and plug it in? No I did not. OK, one computer left, and it's the old PC laptop.

When I said earlier I was surrounded by 5 robust computers, I lied. I was surrounded by 4 robust computers and one rather slow machine. It's a decent PC -  a newish X41 Tablet - but it's only got 256k RAM, so it's dead slow. I new it would be 15 minutes or so before the thing booted, updated, and finally downloaded the 11MB file, so I decided to tackle the font problem. I decided to simply delete all the fonts in folders. Bad idea. Suddenly the IM conversation I was having with Susan turned to gibberish. My keyboard was responding to my typing, but not with the correct letters. My email and stickies no longer displayed correctly. I had broken my Mac.

I watched my PC laptop struggle to get the file open. I tried to launch YM on it, but it was too busy struggling with Powerpoint to respond.

So there I sat, with all this technology around me, unable to do a damn thing.

Just my luck: the meeting got moved out an hour.

I was able to fix the font thing. To do so I accessed the Library via the Macintosh HD (as opposed to from my home). The font folder there contains the default set (or the right set, at any rate). I copied them, and pasted them into Home > Library and I was good to go. It was that simple. I loved my Mac again.

The meeting went fine, although there was no speakerphone on the other end, so my "call in" was a cell phone sitting on the table - I had to ping them via IM if I wanted to talk.

We had a good laugh about having bad technology karma for the morning, but man was it frustrating. I'm still not back 100%. My Windows installation on my main Mac is hosed, and I don't know yet if it's a Parallels issue, a Windows CD issue, or a CD Drive issue. But I'm up and running again anyway. But I'm really ready for technology to get another order of magnitude simpler and more reliable.

Bullish on Apple

Leander Kahney writes in Wired News about the change in how people are thinking about Apple in the last few weeks. There certainly does seem to be a widespread shift an attitudes about Apple. He points out that Wilkes University in Pennsylvania is switching to Mac to save money, and experts are recommending Macs for the enterprise. There's no longer an argument that there's not enough software available for Macs, since Macs can run Windows software perfectly well. Even Wall Street thinks Apple is a good deal these days.

Kahney attributes this sea change to the iPhone and the fact that it already looks to be a massive hit. I disagree.

More and more people are having to make the decision about upgrading to Vista. If they're forced into upgrading to Vista when they buy a new computer, they also have to make the decision about any other computers they own for compatibility reasons. And then there's MS Word 2007, which will require a translator to play nice with previous versions of itself.

With a Mac running Parallels Windows apps run right alongside Mac apps, and the two OSs can share files with a simple drag and drop. You no longer have to worry about viruses. A Mac desktop doesn't cost much more than an equivalent PC laptop. And there's that whole "ease of use" thing, and the fact that for the most part things just work on a Mac. Why would anyone buy a PC any more if they didn't have to? No wonder Mac sales are up.

And I agree that in the case of Wall Street, buzz about the iPhone helps, but you really have to give the iPod a fair amount of the credit as well..

Have your views about Apple changed? How? Why?

New Parallels: Seamless!

The recent Parallels Desktop for Mac upgrade makes you feel like you've gone completely Mac. In the previous version, Windows ran in its own window on your desktop. This upgrade lets you run Parallels in coherence mode, which means you can run your Windows programs directly on your Mac desktop. The familar Windows taskbar sits along the bottom of your screen, just above the Apple dock. This screenshot (click the image to view it at 800x600) shows VPchat and Yahoo Instant Messenger running on my Mac desktop. Both programs are running smoothly and seamlessly.

Other great new features include:

• Resizable guest OS window (and automatic resolution adjustment when you resize)
• Capability to copy & paste between Mac and Windows screens
• Create multiple virtual machines

Full feature list

Switch to Mac: a delightfully short list of complaints

How much do I love my new Mac? So much that simply could no longer stand to use my PC laptop, and am now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro computer in addition to the desktop Mac. I bought it on my way home from a meeting in San Antonio. Impulsive enough for ya?

I do have a few peeves, however:

• You can only resize windows from the lower right corner, unlike in Windows, where you can resize from any corner and any side. I hope Apple fixes this in Leopard.
• Remote access is pretty weak. I used GoToMyPC all the time, and loved it. It even allowed me to use a Mac to log onto my home PC. Unfortunately there's no Mac version, so I'm relegated to Vine Server. It's adequate, but not very friendly, and it won't force my entire desktop into my laptop window - I have to auto-scroll to move across the desktop.
• There's no (at least I think there's no) way to view thumbnails or previews of images in directory windows. I miss this when placing a graphic from a long list of files.
• I can't reliably tab my way to pop-up menus. I can never do it in Firefox - I can occasionally do it in Safari. I'm used to rapidly filling out forms without moving my hands from the keyboard, but I nearly always have to go back and manually select the "state", and any other pop-ups. Update: I found a fix for this!.
• The MacBook Pro battery SUCKS. I mean really, seriously sucks. I get 2.5 hours, tops.

Not a bad list - all very fixable with software with the exception of the battery. I can't imagine how long a list of PC/Microsoft complaints would be...

Installing Windows on a Mac: the short version

My original post on this was rather a lot to slog through, so here's the short version of my recommendations for installing Windows on a Mac using Parallels. More info here.

• If you're going to install Vista, make sure it's either Ultimate or Business. Home versions, even premium, will not work with Parallels. More info here.
  If you're installing XP, I'm assuming you're starting with a legitimate copy.
• Do the installation offline. You'll need Norton installed before you connect to the net.
• If the CD you have happens to be SP1, you'll need to upgrade to SP2 and install Nortons before going online
• SP2 is hard to find. I had to hit up a friend with a private server to find a copy.
• Burn a copy of SP2 and Nortons to a CD (I've done this - you're welcome to borrow my CD if you live nearby :)
• Install SP1
• Copy the SP2 installer and the Nortons installer to the desktop before installing
• Upgrade to SP2
• Install Nortons
• Go online when Nortons goes to upgrade LiveUpdate.
• Update Windows

I've had no trouble since my first successful installation.

Installing Vista on a Mac: lessons learned

Here's a newer post of my successful installation of Vista.

(Originally posted Feb. 15)

This is really more an update to the original post about installing Windows on a Mac. I've since learned that the version of Vista that I bought - Windows Home Premium - is not compatible with a Mac running Parallels. According to Mary Jo Foley of Zdnet,

"Here's the back story: Parallels Desktop for Mac product allows users to run Windows and Mac OSX side-by-side on Intel-based Apple machines. But due to Microsoft licensing restrictions, Parallels users are allowed to run only certain versions of Windows Vista - namely Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise (available to Microsoft volume licensees only) and Windows Vista Ultimate - in a virutalized environment. In order to run Windows Home Basic or Vista Home Premium using Parallels, users must buy additional licenses of these products in order to not violate their end-user license agreements (EULAs), Microsoft officials said. Full story.

Apparently Vista Home Basic will work with BootCamp - the license issue focus on running Vista on a virtual machine. I wish I would have found the Parallels official statement about it before I bought the Home Premium edition.

I found nothing about additional licensing anywhere I looked. Basically, you'll need to buy either Enterprise or Ultimate to run it with Parallels on your Mac.

iCal and iPhone

Well, if the iPhone does indeed offer full calendar capabilities in the form of iCal, I may be switching from Verizon to Cingular, despite Cingular's lack of decent coverage. I am completely hooked on iCal. I can have as many calendars as I want, and view any combination of them at any time. It has a simple but robust to-do list, is sharable, and has an intuitive interface. I rely heavily on my Palm Treo 650 calendar. iCal easily outdoes it.

iCal is compatible (and very similar to) Google Calendar, and will sync with Palm and Windows CE PDAs.