Wednesday, March 21, 2012

TyL: Sometimes Free is all you Need.

Soooo, when I wiped my computer and installed OS X 10.7 earlier this year I threw away my VMware Fusion 2.0 install... just in time for tax season.

For some reason no one makes tax software for Macs that I can find (at least, north of the border), so I used to just load the software up in a Windows XP VM, plunk in my numbers, and get on with it. As such, I grabbed the install DVD for VMF2.0, slapped it in, and was greeted with a: "Sorry, we'll only install on Intel Macs!" error...

A short Google later I find out 2.0 won't run on 10.7 unless you boot into 32 bit mode. Yeah... no. Not wasting my time rebooting again and again for that. Some more Googling ensues and I find VirtualBox, a VM from Oracle ( and Sun before the purchase), that's conveniently free. WTF, give it a shot before dropping stupid money on a "commercial" VM.

30 Minutes later I'm up and running with no issues. Zippy, more responsive than VMF2.0 at least ever was, and entirely serviceable for the things I'm going to be doing with it.

Don't know if it games - don't care - but if all you need is something to boot Windows Apps from time to time you should be playing around with this before paying for something else.

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