Why running Windows 8 on a Mac is better than running it on a PC
I've made no secret of the fact that OS X has replaced Windows as my primary platform to do day-to-day work on. The reasons are many and varied (and of you want the long story I suggest you check out this post) but the TL;DR version of it is that with Windows 8 Microsoft took the platform in a direction that wasn't compatible with what I wanted from an operating system.
Note: For the purposes of this piece I'll be referring to Windows 8, but everything applies equally to Windows 8.1.
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However, this doesn't mean that I've managed to purge the PC Doc HQ of Windows.
Far from it.
While OS X Mavericks does an admirable job of handling what I want from a platform, I still need Windows, and have a variety of versions installed on machines, both physical and virtual.
I also have Windows 8 installed on my Mac, running through the excellent Parallels Desktop 9 application. There are a number of products on offer that will allow you to do this (not to mention Apple's own Boot Camp software), but I've gone with Parallels Desktop 9 because it gives me the best performance and battery life. On top of that I've got Windows isolated inside a virtual machine, and have the ability to take system snapshots and roll back to earlier configuration when things go wrong.
Now so far running Windows on OS X doesn't given me any more than running Windows on Windows would give me (other than the different host OS) but there's another feature of Parallels Desktop 9 which, in my opinion, makes running Windows 8 on OS X much than running it on a PC.
Let me show you what it is:
Yes, that's a Start menu, built into the OS X Dock, along the same lines as the Start menu that Microsoft decided to remove from Windows 8. And while it looks and feels much like the Start menu that I grieve for, it has an added super power – the ability to fire up my Windows virtual machine and load the application up in a matter of seconds.
The whole experience has also been a very seamless one. Not once have I had to futz about with drivers, and not once have I had everything come crashing down around me when an application decides to misbehave.
So I get OS X and Windows, I have the comforting feeling of having Windows isolated from everything else, and I get an adequate replacement for the Start menu.
Perfect.