Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
28 June 2006
Filed under:Personal,Software reviews at3:32 pm

Having bought a desktop PC (dubbed ‘playmate’) for (mostly) games and (partly) other applications like NVivo which don’t run on my iBook, I find that I have had to learn how to network between them inside the home. So now using VNC I can view my iBook’s screen in a window on my PC then when I have finished working on a file on my Mac I can use Windows Sharing to open my Mac’s filing system as if it were a drive on my PC and copy what I need across. I can even print to my printer in the study from my Mac in the living room. It’s like my Mac is somehow ‘inside’ my PC. Rather eerie – and I confess it makes me feel like I am finally catching up to the level of computer skill exhibited by some of my friends. Of course they have been doing this kind of thing for years…

3 Comments »

  1. You sound like a prime candidate for the new Intel-powered MacBooks. Then you could run Parallels and have Windows and Mac OS X on the same machie. Actually, rumours and screenshots show Windows apps running inside Mac OS X in a way similar to classic MacOS 9 apps on the old PPC Macs.

    For the games of course you can dual-boot into Windows for full GPU speed.

    Comment by Reid — 28 June 2006 @ 3:39 pm

  2. Well only the MacBook Pro has sufficient GPU speed to run most games and it’s not available in the 12-13″ size I prefer. Also, it costs £1400 ($CAD 2900) whereas my desktop PC with more powerful CPU and graphics cost me £500. Also I tend to avoid version 1 products where possible! Nonetheless if Apple had given the MacBook 13″ an ATI or NVideo graphics processor I might have been tempted. As it is this setup should last me until 2008 or so by which time the Intel-based Macs should have bedded down nicely…

    Comment by David Brake — 28 June 2006 @ 4:42 pm

  3. sounds to me like you dont have enough to do!

    Comment by Russ — 29 June 2006 @ 10:45 pm

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