Installing Parallels on Liz’s Mac

Spent a good chunk of the afternoon looking over documentation and installing Parallels on Liz’s laptop.

She needs a program for her grad school classes (called SAS), and that program requires a Windows environment to run. In looking around today, I learned a fair amount about how Parallels works, how to take screenshots, and all that fun stuff. I’m only somewhat understanding NAT and routers, and am unsure whether our linksys wireless router is enough of a natural firewall or not. To be super safe, I went ahead and installed ZoneAlarm… but I’m not sure if that’s overkill or what.

It’s been a long while since I’ve had to think about securing a PC environment, remembering all the stuff I needed to track down (AdAware, AVG, etc).

The overall performance on the Mac wasn’t so hot, but I didn’t have too much time to tweak the settings. The real test would be to see how well Parallels handles PC games… and whether or not Boot Camp would be the better approach.