Operating System

The first hurdle was that I hadn't upgraded my Mac OS since 10.5. I know, I know, this is a shocking admission for someone doing the kind of work that I do... but... there is only so much I can do at any one point of time (I focused more on teaching myself how to use all the CS5 version of the adobe applications one by one), and I will say that upgrading to Lion was simply not very high on my priority list. Not until now, when i wanted to be able to do this for an installation.

There are a few reasons why i am going with Windows for this, the most silly reason being:

"MacOSX: Only OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and above with an Intel based CPU is currently supported."

You will have to upgrade to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) with the CD, BEFORE you can upgrade again to 10.7 (Lion) which is available online. Forgetful people like Debbies who are looking to buy the Snow Leopard CD (as of October 2011) at this embarrassingly belated date will be devastated to hear that no brick-and-mortar computer shops in Singapore still stock this mystical CD, which is required for the upgrade to Lion. No need to walk around Funan and Sim Lim, its all gone. It is also said that you can probably approach an Apple Servicing Centre for a copy of this elusive Snow Leopard but I am sure you'll find your own way around it. You probably aren't even having to deal with this problem if you are techy enough to be reading this far into the page.

Anyway, in the end, the faster method seemed to be installing Parallels Desktop 7 + Windows 7 as i wanted to potentially try the Microsoft Kinect SDK (windows only) which apparently has some differences compared to PrimeSense's OpenNI. We will see later after I install both and try them out.

In any case I am keen to explore Windows having seen all the stuff people are making on windows-only things such as vvvv, so its as good a reason to start installing Parallels on my mac.

This is the first time I've got Windows running in almost ten years. After patiently waiting for it to install for some time, I looked up at the screen and a giant bouncy arrow was on my screen, and it was screaming "PARALLELS!!! PARALLELS!" I clicked on it and HOLY SHIT ITS THE WINDOWS START BAR!



See Also:
Parallels
Windows 7 Home Premium