Studio on a MAC

Hi,

I have purchased Studio and have a MAC. Can anyone give me some advice on how to install this?

Thank you

Maida

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  • Hi Maida

    As Studio is a Windows application, it will not run directly on MacOS. However, a Mac is able to also act as a Windows machine. There are two ways you can achieve this:

    1. Install Bootcamp, which is delivered by default with every Mac. The advantage of this solution is that it is free. The drawback is that you need to decide when booting your Mac whether you want to launch MacOs or Windows. If you launch Windows, your Mac will behave as a Windows machine until you reboot it. It means, you use it either as a Mac or as a Windows machine and if you want to switch from one to the other, you need to reboot the computer.

    2. Purchase an add-on product such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion. Both these products need to be installed on your Mac (under MacOS) and will allow you to run so-called "virtual machines" (kind of a PC inside another PC, abbreviated as VM). You can therefore create a virtual machine (VM) in which you install Windows like you would on any other PC. In this Windows VM, you can then install Studio as well as all your other Windows applications. The big advantage is that both operating systems run at the same time, in parallel (hence the name of one of the products). This is really very comfortable because it allows you for example to use the Mac for your mail, for browsing, for photos, etc. and Windows for Studio, MS Office, etc. There is no need to reboot at all. You have two worlds in one! The only drawback here is that you need a Mac that is powerful enough to handle this and this mainly relates to memory and disk storage. You should have at least 8 GB of RAM and 512 GB of disk storage. And you need to purchase the software, but this is not very expensive (99 USD).

    Hope this helps. Feel free to ask if you have any more questions.

    Walter

    Addendum: Let me add this: once you have purchased Parallels (or Fusion), you install this on your Mac as you would install any other Mac software. Once installed, you launch Parallels and create a VM (there are nice video tutorials from Parallels showing exactly how to do this). You tell Parallel that it is a Windows VM, need to tell it which version (Windows 7, 8 10,...), how much RAM and disk storage you want to assign to it (it's like you would configure your own PC:-)). And last but not least, you need to give it a Windows installation medium, either as a DVD if your Mac still has an optical drive or as an ISO file (which obviously means that you need to have a Windows license). When you start this VM, it will then install Windows as you would on a "normal" PC. Once Windows is installed, you can use it as you would use a Windows PC. One of the big advantages of using Parallels (or Fusion) is that you can create so-called snapshots. These are an image of the current state of a VM and allow you to come back to a previous state. This is very useful for example when installing new software or MS updates. You take a snapshot before you do the install/update (it's only one click and takes only a few seconds), name it and go on. If anything goes wrong with the upgraded Windows, you simply go back to this snapshot. This feature alone might be a reason to use a virtualization tool such as Parallels (or VMWare or VirtualBox). I suggest that you take also such a snapshot after the initial installation and before you install the SDL software. 

  • Hello Walter, I read your answer with great interest. I'm considering buying Studio since several of my clients require it. However, I used VMware a few years ago and gave up because it slowed down my computer too much. As you said, it was probably not powerful enough. So I am reconsidering both options (VM or Bootcamp). Here is my question: in both cases, I suppose I have to buy a Windows license?
    thank you.
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