There's also the option of Parallels for running a virtual machine. While that might sound great, assuming I don't mind paying more money for Parallels, Vista is such a big beast that it would likely be somewhat painful to go down this road, unless of course I'm willing to sit back and pop some popcorn in between application loads.
I then pondered if it would be possibly to RDP from my Mac to my Vista machine (in this case my laptop on the local home network is now the ugly stepchild that doesn't get the attention it deserves...Macs will undoubtedly cause this imbalance, sorry Windows). To my surprise, I was able to get this smoothly working without issue in a matter of minutes.
1. Enable RDP on your Vista machine. While I don't have concrete information, I have heard that the lower end version of Vista such as Vista Home may not support RDP inbound, so make sure your version supports this feature.
2. Install this lovely free RDP client from Microsoft, custom built for the good old Mac (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx).
3. Load the application once it's installed and head straight for the preferences - I made sure to change it so that it would go "full screen" on the display tab, and I also upped the colors to "millions".
4. Lastly, key in your LAN ip address (i.e. 192.168.x.x) and your windows credentials and you should be all set!
While this will vary from person to person, I was exceedingly pleased with this arrangement, as my screencasting process allows me to capture all of my Vista interactions, just as I capture my Mac interactions. I'm also now able to do both Objective-C / Cocoa development on my Mac as well as C# / 3.5 .NET on my PC. Talk about a streamlined multi-OS setup!
3 comments:
If you're like me and try to keep all unnecessary Microsoft products off your mac, give CoRD a try. It's a FOSS replacement for Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection application.
http://cord.sourceforge.net/
Great recommendation. I gave it a try - looks solid, just one problem; it doesn't support remoting to Vista (so for the time being it looks like I'm going to stick with the RDP client from MS).
Is there a way to remote desktop into my mac from a Vista machine? I have a music server package on a mac with Leopard and I want to access it from my Vista desktop so I can control it from my office.
I'm using VMWare on my Macbook Pro 2.4 Ghz 4 gig mem machine and have installed Vista Premium as a virtual machine. It actually runs really fast. Faster than I have seen Vista run on a moderately powerful PC notebook actually.
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