Finding an replacement for Windows...

Those of you guys who regularly read my blog know, that my old Laptop had died on me. The only reason I kept the thing around was for my classes at the WIFI online learning  platform. Since the WIFI platform only supports the PC versions of Explorer and Firefox, I had to find a solution. Of course I knew that I could run Windows on my Mac. But I wasn't sure if I wanted to run it through Bootcamp or through Parallels. After all there are distinctive differences. While bootcamp has the benefit of being able to take advantage of the Mac's hardware completely, it has the disadvantage, that you have to reboot your machine every time when switching between both systems. Parallels on the other hand doesn't offer you as much hardware advantage, but it has the benefit of letting you switch between Mac and Windows as if it where just another App on your desktop.
At first I wasn't sure what route to choose. But pretty quickly it was quite clear to me that Parallels was the route to go. After all I use Windows just for minor tasks. For my online studies and for certain applications that aren't available under OSX like MS Access for instance.
So I purchases and downloaded a copy of Parallels right away. Everything from the purchasing process over download and all the way up installing the app was exactly as I expected it...just a piece of cake. That's one of the thins I love about my Mac...things are really easy and work.
Next up was downloading a copy of Windows. Since I had no copy of the Windows version that came with my old laptop I knew there was no way around than to purchase another copy. I really didn't want to buy a copy of Windows 8 or Windows 8.1. Version 8 of Windows just drives me crazy. It does reminds me a lot on the troubles people used to have with Vista. And since I had to purchase a Windows copy anyways I was definitely going to go with Windows 7. Found a place to buy it online for a really good price. A full version of Windows 7 Home Premium for about 24 bucks. Of course I had my doubts if that was a full version or maybe just an upgrade version. But for that price there wasn't really that much lost. So I purchase the thing and paying by credit card I was expecting to be able to download it immediately. No so much luck. So I was kinda furious, as the email said that the payment had to be verified first. I was just about to right a really salty email to them when I get another email about 20 minutes after the purchase, giving me the link to download the disk image. So I go ahead and do just that. Of course it takes some time. But there's nothing you can do about that. Of course not having at a DVD drive I had to put the disk image on a USB drive. Just wished they would tell you that the USB drive needs to be Mac formatted. Took me quite some time to figure that out. Luckily one of my external hard drives is a mac formatted one. But of course I wasn't going to install Windows on my Mac before having a whole backup. So I start up time machine and let it run a backup. By the time the backup was done it was time for me to head to bed. So to Windows "story" will continue tomorrow.