For the masochists among you.
My prime, nay, sole, motivation for installing Windows on my Lion Hackintosh was to allow me to look at some computer games our 9 year old had programmed which run on Windows only. (At this juncture feel free to speculate at the wisdom of a parent who sends his son to a class which uses Windows).
If you have your original Windows discs it’s free, as easy as any Windows task ever is and works. Mine is Windows XP SP3, but any version through Windows 7 is supported, not to mention many flavors of Unix and, for those unwilling to hack their PC, you can even run Mac OS X from within Windows.
The product is the updated version of the one I ran under Snow Leopard and is named VirtualBox. Created by Sun it’s now part of Oracle and it’s free. Set it up right (the instructions are good but ‘techie’) and you can run Windows in an OS Lion window and cursor directly to that window like any other OS window. Windows runs in its own space and viruses cannot migrate to the OS installation. Several years with VB under Leopard and Snow Leopard have not resulted in any problems on the Mac side. Yes, I still get the inevitable lock-ups on the Windows side.
You can download VirtualBox here; it’s professionally supported and I have found it to be bug free.
Here’s a snap of Win XP running in Lion:
By all accounts Windows 7 is far better than XP or Vista so if you must have Windows and do not want to have to boot into a separate partition or use another machine, this is one way to go. Speed is fine on my Hackintosh and you don’t have to be Einstein to do this successfully. Sound worked out of the box as did wireless broadband. Once I installed the included ‘Guest Additions’ software (it’s under ‘Devices’ in the VB menu) I was able to set screen definition to full screen and the mouse cursor no longer had to be clicked in the Windows window to make it work. Looking at the simply awful font rendering in this OS I can’t help wondering how anyone with any aesthetic values could use this garbage. Whatever.
During the long, rambling installation process, which I had to redo from scratch as the Lion installation trashed my previous VB/Win, I grumbled about Windows to a friend, who is an iPad/Mac babe. Her reply was priceless: