I have  been a Mac user for just over one year.  Before that, I was a devoted user of ThinkPads, starting with the first ever color screen notebook computer, the ThinkPad 700, in 1992 (or thereabouts).  The ThinkPads were cool - they had a sturdy system architecture that seemed to crash less frequently than the other PC's.  Their keyboard was the best in the business.  And the pointing stick was so much easier to use than a touch pad (I never did understand the utility of having to take your fingers off the keyboard and flick them around on some pad, each time you wanted to make an edit.  It seemed so much more intuitive - and efficient - to be able to make edits to a document while your fingers are still on the keyboard!).

That all ended when I bought my first Mac PowerBook last spring. What convinced me to change was a smooth presentation delivered by my Accounting Professor in a graduate school class.  Here was an advanced bean-counter, delivering a financial presentation not from a PC, but from a Mac.  And he was not even using PowerPoint for Mac, but their own presentation software called Keynote. The presentation was so much more clear, the graphics stronger, and the transitions more smoothly animated, than the clunky PowerPoint presentations given by other professors.  So I switched.  I will never go  back to PC.  Here are the reasons:

• Better operating system
• Better software
• Better hardware

I'll be happy to discuss these in future articles.  But first let's consider a small problem that I and many other converts had:  I still had some Windows programs that were absolutely critical to my profession.  In my case, an electronic market charting program called Ensign (http://www.ensignsoftware.com  )

This all changed when Apple announced their new Intel-based notebook line, the MacBook Pro.  Because they use the same processors as PC's, the underlying "logic" is the same.  All Apple had to do was adapt their more robust, more stable, and more intuitive operating system, OSX, to the Intel platform.  Logically, an Apple computer that runs on an Intel machine should also be able to run Windows.  Of course, why anybody would want to buy a Mac and then run an inferior operating system, is beyond me.  But to support those tweener's, Apple came up with a product called BootCamp which allows you to choose which operating system you want to use, when you boot up the computer. That way, Mom and Dad can boot into Mac OSX, and the kids can boot into Windows XP and play WarCraft or Halo.  Or people like me can boot up into Windows in order to run our financial analysis software. The cool thing is, Macs run Windows just as fast, and in many cases faster, than PC's!

But wait.  If I'm running Windows, then I cant' get my email on Apple Mail (or on Microsoft's Entourage, their Mac equivalent of Outlook).  And I can't build my presentation in Keynote.  And I can't play my iTunes music.  And I can't use Spotlight to search my entire drive instantaneously for any file or email. 

That's where Parallels Workstation comes in.  Parallels is a  Virtual Machine (VM) that enables you to run Windows directly from within the Mac OSX, as a window within a window. This way you can have the best of both worlds.  So who would ever limit their options by booting into just one OS?   Before the Intel Macs, Microsoft had a product called Virtual PC that allowed you to run any Windows based program from within a Mac.  The problem with this product was that it was an emulator; it had to go through a slow and clumsy translation process. The result was that  most Windows programs were slow as molasses.   It was only really useful for people like web developers who wanted to run an instance of the Internet Explorer web browser to check how a web page might look.  But for all other purposes, it was just too darn slow.   But now with the new Intel based Mac's, there is no more need for the bottle-neck of an emulator.  All one needs is the ability to run two operating systems at the same time, both "native" to the Intel processor.  The only issues are how to share common resources such as CPU, video memory, RAM memory, and peripheral ports like USB's.  The good news is that a Windows XP "virtual machine" running as a window within OSX, runs nearly as fast as it does on a PC.  The performance issues are gone.  We now have the best of both worlds.