Is it possible to do ECDL on a mac?

[smellywashingmachine]

I've got to do ECDL as part of a professional qualification. My uni don't offer a mac version, neither does my local test centre. Is it even possible to do it on a mac?

I googled and found some kind of online mac compatible ECDL course for £150 but I'd still have to go somewhere to take the tests at 7 x £12.

So I've borrowed my mum's crappy laptop which runs Windows Vista (the most incomprehensible operating system I've ever tried to navigate grrrrrrrrrrrrr) and I can't get it to access our wifi FFS.

Alternatively, I believe I can do something to turn my mac into a windows machine but it looks complicated (and expensive).

It would be a LOT easier if I could just do ECDL on my mac...

Googling for "ecdl mac" throws up some interesting things, including www.learn-new-skills-from-home.com/faqs.html#ecdlapple

ECDL has taken some criticism for being very pro-Microsoft. It doesn't so much teach you about Word Processing but teaches you about Word, which in my opinion is very very wrong.

However when you've got to do it you've not got a lot of choice.

If you're having trouble getting Vista onto your home network and having it on your home network would fix your problems then it might be easiest to just go out and buy a network cable for a few quid and physically connect the laptop to your router. No that's not ideal but it might be the simplest and cheapest way through this.

Running Windows apps on a recent(ish) Mac isn't that tricky, but it does involve buying Windows, which can be pricey.

Thanks for this. I tend to agree that it would be much easier and cheaper to get this bloody Vista machine online, so that's what I'll concentrate my efforts on.

"it does involve buying Windows, which can be pricey."

If you have a child of school age, you can get Windows from Software4Students for not much. The Boot Camp route is shit, though: VMware (or VirtualBox or something works much better, provided you have a reasonable amount of RAM in your machine.

"The Boot Camp route is sh*t, though: VMware (or VirtualBox or something works much better,"

No, they're different things....

Boot Camp gives you what is in effect a proper Windows Machine. Macs are decent bits of hardware and make decent boxes to run Windows on. However when you turn your machine on you have to choose if you want it to be a Windows box or a Mac.

VMWare and similar things (e.g. Parallels) allow your Mac to run up as a Mac but then run Windows applications in your usual Desktop.

While that can be easier, for example you can copy and paste between a Mac email and a Windows app, it is considerably slower to run Windows Applications in that way. Ticking away underneath the hood is an impressive little engine that all the time is translating all the Windows things you are doing into something that will work on a Mac. And that takes up memory and slows things down.

So it depends on what you're doing.

If you've got a powerful Mac and the Windows Applications you want aren't that complex then something like VMWare will be great.

However for complex Windows Applications or where you want the best performance you can get then you'll want to use Boot Camp.

Horses for courses and it's wrong to label either as "sh*t".

"Ticking away underneath the hood is an impressive little engine that all the time is translating all the Windows things you are doing into something that will work on a Mac."

No, that's not the case. You're conflating bare metal virtualisation with older technologies like Virtual PC and Codeweavers/Wine etc. VirtualPC would run on PowerPC macintoshes and do instruction emulation, for example, and Wine/Codeweavers do complex API emulation so you can run Windows applications without needing a copy of Windows. They're slow, because they're doing a whole stack of stuff.

VMware and Parallels are running windows on top of hardware virtualisation, just as we do in data centres for other reasons, and the penalty is a few percent, if that, plus an extra trip around the houses for the screen updates. 3D graphics applications need a following wind to work, but for everything else, the penalty is trivial.

I run VMware with Windows in it on a Dell Mini 9 sub notebook that I've hackintoshed, which has performance substantially less than any Intel device Apple have ever shipped. I've used it for software development, and certainly running Office in an XP virtual machine was completely indistinguishable from running it with the machine booted straight into Windows XP, with 2GB of RAM. In 1GB, probably a bit tight, but Apple haven't sold machines with less than 2G in for several years.

Yes I know all about virtualisation and it's difference from instruction emulation. It seems that like you I do an awful lot of stuff on virtual boxes now, so I'm aware of the pros, and the cons.

My point was that if you're running a machine that's having to be both a Mac and a Windows machine at the same time then you're going to have limits that you're just not going to have if you dedicate it to being one machine or the other.

Whether those limits are a problem or not depends completely on what you're trying to do and the spec of your machine.

Gamers would, more than likely, run smack into them right away.

Office users might be fine but then might start to feel a bit bogged down when working with multiple huge files.

Boot Camp takes away those limits and focusses the machine on being one thing. Some people don't need that, which is fine, but to call it s**t is just wrong.