Windows via OnLive Desktop
Parallels and VMWare are useful and powerful, all right. But they’re memory hogs, disk-space pigs, and sluggish to start up and shut down.
On the horizon, however, there’s a newer Windows-on-Mac alternative that spares you the disk, memory, and speed penalties. It’s called OnLive Desktop (www.onlive.com).
It’s a Mac app. When you open it, you see a standard Windows 7 desktop, right there on your Mac. The full, latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader are set up and ready to use: no installation, no serial numbers, no pop-up balloons nagging you to update this or that. It may be the least annoying version of Windows you’ve ever used.
The PC that’s driving your Mac Windows experience is, in fact, a “farm” of computers at one of three data centers thousands of miles away. Every time you click your mouse or press a key, you’re sending signals to those distant computers. The screen image is blasted back to your Mac with astonishingly little lag.
OnLive offers various plans with various features. It’s free to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For $10 a month, the company says that you’ll be able to use whatever Windows software you want.
At this writing, the Mac version of OnLive is still in the works—the iPad version works beautifully. Once it’s available, hold onto your hat: You’ll have a super fast, virus-free, always-updated Windows world available to your Mac whenever you need it.
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