Most of my working hours as a web designer have been spent with PCs of varying calibers sharing (and cluttering) the desk with my Mac. I say cluttering because they really weren’t much more than that; these were machines way past their heydays that had only one purpose in mind: Internet Explorer.

So it was with a lot of anticipation that I made the leap to Parallels Desktop at work a couple weeks ago. We’d already consolidated monitors by running the PC into the second monitor’s VGA input, but this eliminated the PC itself, the router, and the electricity required to power them. That’s all very novel, but I really just wanted a new toy that would put the Core Duo to good use.

My first experience with Parallels was of a more experimental nature; I figured that now was the time to kill two three birds with one stone and also crack open Vista and IE7. An in-depth walkthrough on the Parallels forum made installation and setup a pleasure. Well, mostly. Vista came with one caveat: no internet.

I searched and searched for ways around this before my boss saved the day. Vista’s network settings were configured to automatically obtain an IP address; unfortunately, it was exactly wrong. So we put in a new IP address and copied the rest of the information from my iMac’s settings, and viola – internet!

Now seems like a great time for an aside regarding both Vista and Internet Explorer 7. They’re very… colorful. I didn’t find either to be as intuitive as their Apple counterparts.

With Vista fully operational, or at least as functional as I needed it, I found a new roadblock: if you want to run IE6 and IE7 side by side, you’re outta luck. Hell, even if you just want to run IE6 alone you’re pretty much still screwed. There is a way to make IE7 emulate 6 in certain terms of performance, but not rendering.

So that’s when Virtual Machine #2 came to visit, and we call him Windows XP. The XP install process went even more smoothly than Vista (since it’s an officially-supported OS), but is really where XP shows its age. On the other hand, installing XP off the CD was actually faster than installing Vista off of the desktop, and the installation as a whole performs better.

Oddly enough, XP didn’t experience the networking issue that Vista did on its first run, but after that it suddenly forgot how to use the internet. The same fix applied here, but all the same it was weird.

So now I have a single-PC office, and that PC just happens to be a Mac.