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May. 8th, 2008 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I have just finished installing Parallels Desktop and Windows XP on my Mac. I can't even begin to express how weird it is to be typing in iChat or Safari while seeing the XP interface lurking in a window below.
On the other hand, once I got the right version of Parallels installed, Windows installed easily, and Windows Update is merrily chugging away in the background downloading ... something. PC folks: do I want SP3, or will it make me hate life? Pretty much all I need to do with Windows is look at web pages I am building, so as long as my version of Windows is running the correct security updates, I think I'm all set.
On the other hand, once I got the right version of Parallels installed, Windows installed easily, and Windows Update is merrily chugging away in the background downloading ... something. PC folks: do I want SP3, or will it make me hate life? Pretty much all I need to do with Windows is look at web pages I am building, so as long as my version of Windows is running the correct security updates, I think I'm all set.
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on 2008-05-08 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-08 09:19 pm (UTC)Since I'm running XP only when I need to do testing (which may only be a few days per month, and in any case, definitely not all the time), it may be okay to just get by with the admin account. But that's why I'm wondering why you got the advice you did -- this virtualization stuff is still very new to me, and I'd prefer not to screw things up.
ETA: I asked my husband, the Windows user, about this, and he said it was a good idea to make a new account, because some programs don't expect you to be running as Admin. So, thanks for the tip! I've set up a new account ... and for some reason, XP is displaying my new account's desktop picture at a different size than the way it displays for Administrator, despite the fact that both accounts have the same display/resolution settings. Why the hell do people use this operating system?
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on 2008-05-08 10:14 pm (UTC)Because there's more hardware available, more software, all of the above is generally much much less expensive, and Apple screwed the pooch -- repeatedly, and with great vim and vigour -- on licensing its hardware and/or OS in ways that would have made its OS more ubiquitous. That said, if it were more ubiquitous, there would also be many many MANY more security threats to the system.
(Yes, yes, I know that was rhetorical, more or less. One sometimes cannot resist poking the Apple fen. Heck, I used to be one of them, until I desperately needed to replace my computer and couldn't afford even a low end Mac on my then-salary. But I could afford a midrange PC laptop for a model that was just being replaced.)
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on 2008-05-08 10:21 pm (UTC)You remind me of something, though -- not that I'm planning on downloading anything on the Windows side of things that doesn't come from a trusted source, but any recommendations on free antivirus software? I've heard so many horror stories about Norton and McAfee that I'm not sure I want to run either.
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on 2008-05-08 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-08 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-08 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-09 07:48 am (UTC)When I installed, I guess it was XP, the first thing I did was to go and ask for all the updates. There were like 23 of them, and some could only be installed by themselves, and others could only be installed in certain combinations of this-or-that-but-not-both. So it took me a few rounds to install stuff, and as I installed stuff, more updates appeared. (I am told this is much better these days.)
I forget how many times I went around on this. Like, most of an afternoon. Rebooted what seemed like 100 times. But with a virtual PC, you can just save off your entire machine as a backup, in case something explodes, so why not?
I told my pals who use Windows, and they were aghast. Eventually I figured out that they would not install any updates unless they felt they had to, because every update had a large chance that something would break. I guess that makes a certain kind of sense.
Then I thought about the Mac attitude, which is, always install updates because they might fix something.
Somehow, this doesn't seem all that much better...
(Well, maybe that's not 100% true. Sometimes updates speed things up, or add whizzy new doo-dads -- not so much, now that Sarbanes-Oxley has set in, but still.)
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on 2008-05-09 01:10 pm (UTC)For the most part, I only care about whether someone can crack into my machine if I leave it unpatched. I need to do so little under Windows that there's just not all that much that could break if I take the wrong system update.
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on 2008-05-09 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-09 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-09 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-09 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-11 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-11 05:34 pm (UTC)