BW 8.0 on iMAC or MacBook Pro?

[Bob]

Hello,

I have BW 8.0, and I am considering switching from a PC to a Mac (if it is economically feasible). I just began my research into Macs today, and I am considering an iMAC or MacBook Pro with Windows 7 and one of the two major Windows emulators (Parallels 5.0 or Fusion 3.0). Has anyone tested these combinations of Mac/Emulator/Windows/BW?:
iMAC - Parallels - Windows 7 - BW
iMAC - Fusion - Windows 7 - BW
MacBook Pro - Parallels - Windows 7 - BW
MacBook Pro - Fusion - Windows 7 - BW

1. What were your results?
2. If you tried more than one of the above combinations, which worked best?
3. What BW functionalities did not work?
4. What speed changes did you notice?
5. How does one export BW data within Windows 7 to the Mac environment?
6. What about printing from BW out of the Window 7 to Mac environment?

Thank you!

Grace and peace,

Bob

[ccozier]

I use BW8 on a MBP (4 meg RAM, 2.8 GHz) with Fusion 3. I do run on Windows 7 occasionally, though my regular platform is XP which has a smaller resource footprint. I can print from BW through Fusion....no problem. I do struggle with copy / paste, though once I get unicode on the clipboard everything is fine. I keep all my BW data on my Mac drive and map a drive in Fusion to that data.

I would never call Fusion a fast load, but once its up and BibleWorks had been launched, the speed is OK. Its not native, but close enough for everyday work. I'm sure replacing my 5400 rpm drive with a 7200 would help the load times, but its not painful enough to justify that cost.

Let me know if you've got specific questions. I've had my MBP for about nine months and love it. Best computer I've ever had hands down.

[brethicks]

I do not use Windows 7 (I use XP), but I can tell you about the rest of your questions. I run XP under Parallels 5. Everything works well. I have 4GB of RAM, and I would definitely take as much RAM as you can get - running Windows does take some resources. BW works great under Parallels. It is fast, and there are only a few glitches. You should note:
1) Occasionally the result list will not display properly as you scroll through the list, but if you go back up and then down again it is fine.
2) Copying via the clipboard works well, even if doing Greek or Hebrew. At times there are minor glitches but I do a lot of copying into Word, Pages, and Keynote/Powerpoint and it works well. However, you can not tell it to paste into the Mac document directly - you have to copy to the clipboard and then paste manually. But this is not really a problem.
3) I do not really directly print from BibleWorks, but printing form Parallels on other things works fine, and you can always import via the clipboard and then print if you want. But my guess is it works fine.

Overall, I am very happy with BW under Parallels with XP running, and would say that BW performs as well or better than it did on my old Dell with XP.

In Christ,

Bret

[Bob]

Dear Clint and Bret,

Thank you both for your helpful replies to my questions. I am encouraged from both your comments that BW on a Mac is feasible. Not only that, I know from long ago experience that the Mac UI is superior to MS, and it seems from your comments that that has not changed.

I hope to make it to the Mac store in the next couple weeks, and after some further investigation, I may have additional questions for you.

In the meantime, thank you again for taking the time to respond, and may He bless you both as you press on in Christ.

Grace and peace.

Bob