[Radiance-general] coherent advice on running Radiance on win32

[Rob Guglielmetti]

Giulio Antonutto wrote:

>http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/
>
>looks to me a quite close solution to the dilemma.
>
>any lucky one tried already?
>
>Rob any chance on your new macbookpro?
>  
>

Hi Giulio,

Yes, I tried it out in beta.  Not terribly impressive at first, as you 
couldn't share files between the virtualized Windows drive and the Mac.  
Then subsequent releases got slower and slower.  Got a  few kernel 
panics along the way too.  They have added a tool to allow sharing 
between filesystems, but I never got a chance to try it out during the 
beta.  That said, it was very cool running AutoCAD 2000 on my MAC!  It 
ran fairly fast at first, but as I said it got slower and slower, but 
you have to take speed with a grain of salt with beta software anyway.  
They just released version 1.0, and I am considering buying it.

I should mention, however, that my MacBook Pro experience has not been 
great lately.  There is a whine, or a screech emanating from the cpu.  
This existed from day one, and it's well documented on the forums.  I 
waited until day 89 of my 90 day free support in hopes that a 
downloadable solution to this would crop up, but it never happened.  So 
I sent my computer to Apple to fix it, I explained the issue to the 
letter, and I got it back yesterday.  Guess what?  It's still busted.  
So now I get to battle with Customer Relations to see about an unlikely 
refund.  I'd rather return it than keep sending it back and forth 
culminating in some statement like "that's normal, that noise".  We'll 
see.  Overall, the Intel Macs are really nice (and FAST (and HOT)).  
I've just got some version 1.0 gremlins in mine, which is a real drag.

I never tried BootCamp, because I don't have a license for windowsXP, 
which is the minimum OS that it supposedly supports.  Parallels allows 
you to install Windows 2000 (which I do have), as well as tons of other 
OSes.  It's pretty cool. 

- Rob