MacBook Pro Portable Genius, 5th Edition

Chapter 12: How Can I Run Windows Applications?

Some of us live in two worlds: the Mac world and the Windows world. Windows PCs dominate certain areas, particularly midsize and large organizations, and there are many applications that run only on Windows. With your MacBook Pro, you can run OS X and Windows on the same computer, which means you really can have the best of both worlds.

Choosing a Windows Option

There are two basic options for running Windows on Macs: Boot Camp and desktop virtualization. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, and you can use both methods when you need to.

Apple’s Boot Camp

Boot Camp is the Apple technology that transforms Mac hardware into a fully capable Windows PC. You can choose to boot up your MacBook Pro into OS X or into Windows. When you boot up into Windows, you have a fully functional Windows PC on your hands.

The strengths of Boot Camp include great performance, maximum compatibility for hardware and software, and a lower cost because your only expense is a copy of Windows.

One downside is that it can be a bit more complicated to share data between the two operating systems because they can’t be running at the same time, and OS X can only read files from the NTFS disk format used by Windows 7 and 8, so you can’t copy files to the Windows disk when running OS X—you need to use a flash drive or a cloud storage service like Dropbox ...