A few weeks ago I received an email saying ‘Free Microsoft Software for CS students - really ‘ This got me thinking, CS students? that means Computer Science, I suddenly felt really geeky. Although I am considering getting the USB symbol tattooed on me! (if anyone ever tells you tattoos aren’t addictive - hit them). Then I got thinking about the free software - ‘goodie’ I said and signed up.

Two weeks later I received my user name and password in my inbox and set about downloading. I downloaded Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, Project pro 2003, Visio pro 2003 and I ordered VisualStudio .NET so I could have it in a pretty box! I still dont know what Project pro and Visio pro are so I’ve just burnt them to a disk and put them in a draw. What I really wanted was a copy of XP pro and .NET so I could practise programming on my own.

I’d decided to install XP on my mac. At first I tried boot camp in which the installation wasn’t exactly successful! I installed bootcamp assistant but when It came to formatting the drive it wasn’t having any of it, apparently my harddrives corrupt. All I had to do was put in my OS X disk and run a disk check but did I really want to do that?

In the end I decided that I didn’t want to have windows seperate from mac, so I went for parallels, sure it costs $80 but thats only ¨£40 and considering the windows was free (and legal) I dont mind. I’m still in my trial period. Its briliant! I can copy and paste from mac to windows and I can access my mac files on the windows PC, they even share the same internet connection and because its running as a virtual machine my windows installation gets the same virus protection as my mac does. It took me a while to work out how to get right click in the parallel windows (ctrl+shift+click) and it can be a bit slow sometimes but I’m upgrading my RAM as soon as I can. I have 1gig at the moment which means windows can only run on a max of just under 512mb ram which isn’t the best for windows.

I only installed windows to run visualstudio .NET and It took me a while but I’ve found the settings to make a c program compile! Its very temperamental though!

What I’m going to show you is a very unnatural site - you have been warned!!