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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

Sun VirtualBox Makes Virtualization on Mac Free

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Months ago, I wrote about my wrestling match to get the 64-Bit Windows 7 Public Beta installed on my MacBook. It took all day, and then, well, I had a copy of Windows on my computer that required a reboot to access. It was, as it turns out, every bit as pointless as many commenters accused my activity of being. I deleted my partition and never really gave it a second thought — even though I could use a Windows install to debug stuff for work.

Until today, that is, when Sun blogger The Fat Bloke provided detailed instructions for installing the most recent revision of the WIndows 7 Release Candidate on VirtualBox, the company’s totally free virtualization system. And I have to say, it works like a charm. I was up and running within about two hours, and I didn’t even need to follow the secondary instructions about Vista mode or whatever. If you’re curious at all, it’s absolutely the best way to get a Windows installation on your Mac for free.

Whether it’s useful remains to be seen. I might find myself deleting this next Sunday.

About the author

Petemortensen

Pete Mortensen is the communications lead for growth strategy firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

Email the author | Read more posts by Pete Mortensen.

7 comments

    The real question is whether Oracle will keep Virtual Box alive.

    Windows 7 is interesting for about 5 minutes. It’s just Vista with a simpler interface. It really should be Vista SP2 given all the issues people have had with Vista.

    >> it’s absolutely the best way to get a Windows installation on your Mac for free

    Cool, I didn’t realize Windows 7 was going to be free, I had wrongly assumed I’d have to buy a Windows license.

    Microsoft did with Windows Vista/Windows 7 what they did with Halo 2 and Halo 3.

    Can I run it on my G4? I haven’t found anything on this.

    I got the new ubuntu release installed and running using virtualbox in less than 30 minutes. I have Windows 7 at work, it’s very irritating. I’ve seen so many comments that it is zippy and a pleasure to use. Whatever. Neither is true, although it could be the hardware’s fault. My preference is not to use any flavor of Windows – and then I can’t figure out what’s so great about Linux, except that it’s free… I wish I could find the definitive guide to why certain OSs are so great…

    windows 7 will not be free. only the current release candidate is and it will expire in june of next year. and no, it will not run on a non-intel mac.
    i played around some with virtualbox, and it’s pretty amazing for freeware. however, i think i will continue to pony up for parallels. there were just some things about virtualbox that really annoyed me. i use parallels at work and have had very little trouble with it.

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