Using a Mac is a treat for many, and after years of living on Window machines, I appreciate the little things OS X provides. There’s no point preaching to the choir here about how OS X is better…most of us already feel that way. But what I’ve realized while working in IT, is that I have to be adaptable since not everybody can run OS X. Perhaps they are scared of the change or have an application that doesn’t have an Mac counterpart. Whatever the reason, not everyone will jump on the bandwagon. This is especially true in a more corporate environment.
So as an IT support technician, I have to be flexible. As much as I hate spending hours removing spyware from users machines using tools like AdAware, HijackThis & Malwarebytes; this is my trade and I need to be proficient in every aspect of it. This is why I need to live in both the Apple (s aapl) and Microsoft (s msft) world at once. There are many options out there such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels, but Oracle’s VirtualBox offering is different in that it’s free.
Free is always good, especially if you only need to access Windows once in a while. VirtualBox can run all flavors of Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/2 & BSD. If you need to support some random piece of software that only runs in Windows 3.1, VirtualBox will do it.
For my example below, I will run through installing Windows 7 in VirtualBox. Read More about How-To: Support Everyone’s OS with VirtualBox