Noob questions...windows emulation on mac OS 10.4

Question

getting my ibook later this week and was wondering about windows emulation. i don't have an intel processor in my ibook (obviously), so what's your recommendation for a product that runs windows on a mac? and, total noob question, do i have to buy a copy of windows? i already have windows on my dell laptop.
thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Hello,
so, do the new macbooks have some kind of software
pre-installed that runs windows? my friends who just
got a macbook tells me he can run windows programs if
he needs to.
The MacBooks have Intel processors in them. So, no emulation is necessary. They can directly install and run Windows if they want.
The reason you need a program like Virtual PC on an iBook is because it uses a PowerPC processor which Windows cannot communicate with. And, the PowerPC Mac's architecture is completely different.
So, that means you need a program like Virtual PC to completely emulate an entire PC computer. Basically, it is a program that simulates a real computer and then translates those Intel instructions into PowerPC instructions that your iBook can understand.
There is a severe performance penalty for all this translation. The iBook G4 will not perform like a regular Windows PC. It will be much slower, and you will need to be more patient. With a G4 iBook, you could reasonably expect your performance to be comparable to a 300 MHz PC running Windows XP.
With a 1.8 GHz iMac G5 and 2 GB of RAM, I was experiencing performance comparable to a 1.3 GHz Intel Celeron system with 256 MB of RAM (which I happened to have around for comparison).
But, for more intensive tasks, the performance was more comparable to a 500 MHz system.
Anyway, back to the Intel Macs. Those machine's only need a free Apple Utility "Boot Camp" to provide the drivers and create a Windows compatible boot partition:
http://www.apple.com/bootcamp/
And, then they need Windows XP Home or Pro. That's it.
With programs like Parallels, they can run Windows inside the Mac OS (or along side it) much like you would with Virtual PC:
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/
i am trying to figure out where this might be useful
in the first place.
It is useful if you need to be able to run Windows software, but don't want to buy a PC. It's more convenient to have one machine that can do everything than it is to have a Mac and a separate PC.
Feel free to ask additional questions if you have them. Or, if you like, hit solved on the post if you feel everything is answered.
But, do let me know if I can answer any additional questions or need to re-state something clearer.