I recently needed to run a Windows application (TurboTax Business) on my Macbook. I know about Parallels, dual boots, etc but those either cost money or seemed like too much work. Based on my experience with the incredible pain of getting a modern Rails stack to run on OSX, I decided to try using a VM, and it worked really well. Can’t recommend it enough.<\/p>\n
I’m not often wowed by software, but VMWare Fusion is effectively magic. You can do the normal VM experience of having a computer in a window, but you can also run Windows programs separately and they behave like normal Mac apps. The 30 day free trial was plenty for me.<\/p>\n
I thought I was either going to have to buy a copy of Windows or do something shady. At the time, Microsoft has stopped selling Windows 7, but it was not how well supported my program was on Windows 8. I haven’t used Windows regularly since Vista, and I did not want this to suck up a bunch of time.<\/p>\n
UPDATE<\/strong>: Microsoft shut down the Digital River links. I was able to find a Windows 8 ISO here:\u00a0http:\/\/getintopc.com\/softwares\/operating-systems\/download-windows-8-pro\/<\/a><\/p>\n From that point, it was easy to create a new VM, using the ISO as the disk. A shared disk folder, networking, etc all work with no additional setup. I downloaded and installed my program, and everything worked.<\/p>\n Discussion threads I read while figuring this out<\/p>\n I recently needed to run a Windows application (TurboTax Business) on my Macbook. I know about Parallels, dual boots, etc but those either cost money or seemed like too much work. Based on my experience with the incredible pain of getting a modern Rails stack to run on OSX, I decided to try using a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-programming","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pazgP-aj","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Luckily, you can legally download ISO images of Windows that come with a trial period, and you buy an activation key when the license runs out. I found a link to all the different variations of Windows 7 here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.w7forums.com\/threads\/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-image-downloads.12325\/<\/a>. I chose\u00a0Windows 7 Home Premium x64 English: http:\/\/msft.digitalrivercontent.net\/win\/X17-24209.iso<\/a>\u00a0(big file).<\/del><\/p>\nStep 3: Interacting with VM<\/h2>\n
Bonus links<\/h2>\n
\n