parallels versus remote desktop

I had the same scenario and the solution that's worked flawlessly for me is VMWare Fusion. I've not tried Parallels, but I work with software developers that use this solution heavily, an VMWare was their recommendation.

There are two ways that I interact with Fusion:

1) Like traditional virtual machine (VM) where you're hosting an entire Windows machine within OS X. What is nice about OS X is that you can have multiple desktops, and you can have Fusion fully occupy one of the desktops. So when you need access to the Windows VM (and it's running), you can literally just swipe over to its desktop.

2) Fusion mode. I do this with Quickbooks frequently. I don't need a full Windows machine/desktop; I just need Quickbooks. So I run Quickbooks in Fusion mode, and within OS X, it just looks like another Mac app.

I also found the setup process to be very straightforward.

Remote Desktop works fine, and if you don't care about having (and managing) your Windows machine sitting around just for that, I think that would be a viable solution and low cost.

I am not familiar with remote desktop so can't help there. With a virtual machine like Parallels, VirtualBox, or VM Fusion you have the Windows environment just a mouse click away no matter where you are. Straightforward, simple, and easy.

http://www.vmware.com/

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Two completely different paths here. Do the processing locally on a virtualized Windows environment, or depend on the network being ok to ensure connectivity to the old box.

If you've got Office on the Mac already, RDC is part of the package and all you're missing is configuring everything. Note that Windows Terminal Server is a product separately licensed from the OS, and by default only allows two connections at a time, unless you purchase extra licenses at a hideous cost. And in older Windows versions, they are prone to hang and lock up, requiring a reboot to restore. Been battling that issue on a Win2003 Server box for over 3 months now, not even taskkill can help there.

OTOH, if you have a spare Windows license around, can download the free Oracle VirtualBox virtualizer and use that instead. Works just fine if you have enough memory to give to the VM. Only issue you may have with VirtualBox is that it is user-oriented, so it only has OS profiles (used when setting up the new VM) for user systems, not server versions.

I've seen that happen before where the installer will just fail quietly and not give you any indication of the failure. When I saw this, it was on Windows 7 32-bit.

All I can say for certain is that QB 2012 R8 is working perfectly on my Windows 7 64-bit Fusion VM.

tMACg wrote:

I installed VMFushion and my old Windows XP software just fine. However, the Quickbooks download won't install for some reason.....uuummmm.

Ah, if you're gonna invest in Fusion, might as well make them work for their keep! Amongst the auxilliary downloadables you will find a tool you run on the Windows box and it clones a Fusion VM from it. Then just copy the file over and import it on the Mac app and you will have an identical copy of your PC.

tMACg wrote:

I installed VMFushion and my old Windows XP software just fine. However, the Quickbooks download won't install for some reason.....uuummmm.

If it works on the original Windows machine use RDC on your Mac and run QB from there, you'll have no configuration beyond sticking a machine name or ip address in the box and configuring the new (redirected) printers, I have found a little more difficulty on XP installations than 7 but that usually turns out to be XP machines that run poorly locally or via RDC..

Cost = Nothing