Win developer on Mac

Hi Guys,

nice forum you have here. I run a small business and about half of my portfolio involves development of Windows applications (with Access and SQL Server) and development on microprocessor platforms. Since I absolutely love technology and really enjoy my iPad 1 and iPod Touch 4th gen, I decided to take the plunge and buy a Mac. (Not that I really need one, I already have a LeNovo notebook, Dell desktop and a couple of other older notebooks, but I've been looking at Macs for a while and took the plunge!)

I was after grunt rather than portability so I went for what I thought was a good compromise and bought a Mid-2011 iMac. Reason for the grunt is that I'd like to start using the Mac as a production machine. For this then I'd need to virtualize Windows and be able to run things reasonably comfortably. After reading some reviews, I decided to give VMWare Fusion 4 a run and have created an image of my LeNovo on the Mac. Initially, performance was terrible but after some tweaking (reducing color depth, disabling LeNovo apps, AV, etc.) it seems to be a lot more responsive. I've got 4GB RAM and have given 1.5GB to the VM and 2 of the 4 cores. In time I'll probably add another 8GB of RAM to the Mac.

Next consideration is running running MS Office (IN OS X). Not much choice these days, most people use it and the money saved buying another suite will be eaten up in the first few hours trying to learn it. I've downloaded MS Office and will install the trial once I've made a disk image of my Mac HD.

I'd like to ask for some advice and some opinions at this point. My questions are:

-Is it feasible to run a Mac as a semi-Windows production machine?
-Will it be easy to sync my data with my LeNovo notebook (I need to visit clients from time-to-time)?
-What is the correct way to make a full disk image of my Mac? (In Disk Utility, if I select "Macintosh HD" and then go to File->New-> I see that "Disk image from Macintosh HD" is disabled)

I'd really like to learn this platform and possibly start developing our apps for OS X and iOS as well, so hopefully I can find a good way forward.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,
Checco

I would recommend you max out the RAM asap - 16G (just because it's cheap). Then allocate at least 4G to the virtual machine. I think you'll see significant performance improvement.

Thanks, will do...will contact my distributor on Monday and see what they have!

I also see that scrolling in Safari can be a little jerky sometimes, any reason for that? "AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB" a little lacking?

Thx, ciao!

-Is it feasible to run a Mac as a semi-Windows production machine?
Yes, should be fine

-Will it be easy to sync my data with my LeNovo notebook (I need to visit clients from time-to-time)?
How much data?, a free dropbox account with both machines synced s probably the simplest solution

-What is the correct way to make a full disk image of my Mac? (In Disk Utility, if I select "Macintosh HD" and then go to File->New-> I see that "Disk image from Macintosh HD" is disabled)
If you want a full, bootable image of the Mac disk then you can use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper - both apps (Google them) will create a bootable exact clone of any drive

Checco said:

Thanks, will do...will contact my distributor on Monday and see what they have!

I also see that scrolling in Safari can be a little jerky sometimes, any reason for that? "AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB" a little lacking?

Thx, ciao!

Click to expand...

2 Primary reasons - Safari has a tendency to gobble up RAM - and if you're on Snow Leopard - Safari 5.x doesn't seem to run as well as it does on Lion.

I don't think jerky scrolling is related to the graphics card - but definitely think getting the higher end graphics card on the Mac is a good move just generally.

Hi Guys,

thanks for the replies.

I have quite a bit to sync, between source code, executables, technical docs and commercial stuff. Most of the source will have to sync with the VM, but all the rest can sit on the Mac. Fortunately some of the development can be done direct on the Mac...thanks Microchip! I think what I might do is set up a NAS, that way I'm nicely OS independent. Only hassle is that NAS' are not really that portable - doesn't seem as thought there are any available in the small format similar to the WD My Passport, for example. But there are flash drives for portability... Once I come up with my final strategy I'll post it to help anyone else doing something similar.

I downloaded SuperDuper and it's really good: cloned my disk and booted from it on USB to verify, no hassles at all!

Relating to Safari, I'm on Lion 10.7 (brand new iMac ) with an AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB - should be pretty decent. It does seem to be resource-related though, as this morning with only Safari and iTunes running (and not VMWare with Win 7), it's scrolling perfectly smoothly! As you recommended, Brian, I'll upgrade the RAM, likely with an additional 2 x 4GB modules to start with.

Soon it'll also be time to start learning Xcode...but that'll be for another post!

Thx again...

Ciao,
Checco