Regular readers will know that I’ve been considering getting a Mac for some time now. After justifying every reason I don’t need or want one, the discovery of some great Mac-only software made me re-consider*.
There’s just one stumbling block. You see, I own Adobe CS3 and Lightroom. Adobe very ‘kindly’ allow users to install copies on two computers, so long as they’re not both used simultaneously (clause 2.4 in the license, for those who are interested). This means I can run Photoshop on my desktop and laptop as required. Great!
However, for some unknown reason Adobe only allow this between computers running the same operating system. That’s right - I can’t install on a Mac and a PC and switch between the two.
Which puts a block on buying a Mac. There’s no way I’m prepared to license even individual Adobe products a second time, and with the number of comps I slice-n-dice being without Photoshop isn’t an option.
There is the option of installing Parallels or VMWare on OSX, an XP guest, and then running CS3. I doubt the feasibility of that - Photoshop runs like a pig on natively, so how much worse would it be under virtualisation!
Any options I’ve missed?
* Not that I want to lock into another proprietory platform. But I dislike Vista and XP is coming to the end of its life-cycle…
2 comments ↓
You can always install XP (or whatever) using Boot Camp and then dual-boot (i.e., run natively when you want to use it)… I believe in either Parallels or Fusion there is an option to virtualise using the native install - which might mean there’s no (or minimal) additional lag!
After all, with Vista, the fastest notebook that runs it…is a Mac!
Hehe! The problem with virtualisation is that Photoshop is a pig to run natively, and the virtualisation would bung it up.
Boot Camp would work, but rebooting… is painful. I am rather tempted by a Macbook I must admit - my laptop needs replacing and they are very sweet! Though as a business owner I’m appreciating Microsoft software more and more as time goes by.
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