Running Windows on a Mac is easy. You install the Virtual PC emulator and then Windows. But this costs a lot of money – $130 for a version of Virtual PC that requires a copy of Windows.
Isn't there a cheaper way?
There is, indeed – two of them, in fact. There are two other PC emulators that run on an OS X Macintosh. One of them is only $24, and the other is $70.
Let's start with the $24 package, called iEmulator, from www.iemulator.com. I tested version 1.7.7 of this software, and found that the price is the only advantage it has. iEmulator is sold with extravagant claims about speed. But it's so slow that you'd never want to use it for anything serious.
A much faster emulator – still quite slow, but easily able to run most Windows software without panting hard – comes from www.lismoresystems.com. It's Guest PC. At $69.99, it's not much more than half the cost of Microsoft's emulator, and it runs almost as fast. A real plus is the way Guest PC handles almost all the chores of installing Windows; Guest PC asks you a few questions before you start installing your copy of Windows, and then handles all the interaction with the Windows installer itself. You can walk away.
Or maybe you can simply go away for the weekend. Installation times for both emulators took much longer than I was accustomed to with Virtual PC. I tried out many versions of Windows on Guest PC and found that the best way to handle an installation was to get it started and drive to work.
But that's not a big problem. Once Windows was installed, it ran quite well on the Guest PC "computer" inside my Mac. Virtual PC is clearly faster, but I was amazed that Guest PC, coming from a company without the huge resources of Microsoft, could produce an emulator that challenged Virtual PC so effectively.
I also found that network connections worked better on my Guest PC Windows installation than they did on my Virtual PC Windows computer. Internet connections worked from the start without any configuration. After installing Firefox under Windows, I was able to surf the Web easily on the Windows side of my Mac.
Guest PC includes a drag-and-drop way of getting files and folders from one system to the other. This worked well most of the time. Configuring each emulated PC – you can run many at the same time – was easier than with Virtual PC.
Unfortunately, Guest PC knows nothing about USB. There's no way to have Windows use a USB device on its own. (Virtual PC handles this nicely.) You can print to a USB printer, but Guest PC simply directs things through your Mac. If you need to print from Windows, Guest PC might not be for you.
Be sure to run good anti-virus and anti-spyware software on the emulated Windows PC. An emulated Windows computer is still a vulnerable system.
