Best Laptop for College?

juillet
Sat, 06 Dec 2014 07:04:41 +0000

No, it’s not difficult to get that software. BootCamp is free and included on every MacBook; BootCamp requires you to choose which partition (Windows or OS X) you are going to run when you first boot up the computer. You can’t switch back and forth without rebooting.

Parallels or VMWare are two virtualization programs that allow you to run a “virtual machine” on your computer. What it does is simply open a separate window in which you can run Windows on your computer without rebooting your Mac. They run about $40, and you can buy them from an Apple store or any retailer that sells software. They’re incredibly easy to use - you just install a Windows operating system on them, and choose how you want it to run. I have one on both my work Mac (which I use to run some statistical software that doesn’t work in OS X) and on my personal Mac (which…I used to use for the same purpose, lol. But I rarely use it anymore at home, just at work).

I just want to note that both options (Boot Camp and the virtual machine) require a copy of a Windows operating system. Many universities give free copies of a Windows operating system to their students, though, so I’d wait before purchasing it.

I will say - I do not use macros in my work, but Word for Mac 2011 does have support for Visual Basic for Applications, which is the platform that macros work by. Some people say it’s absolutely fine and some people say it’s terrible. I will also say that I have used Excel to do some basic and intermediate statistical analyses (mostly for teaching purposes, because I would otherwise never use Excel to do this!) and it works fine for that. There are several free third-party add-ins that you can use to enhance the statistical functionality of Excel; I think that they serve as stand-ins for the official Microsoft release, which if I recall correctly is not supported on a Mac, but I don’t remember. Because, again, why when you can use Stata or SAS?