Want to run Windows on your Mac without having to Boot Camp reboot every time? You could pay about a hundred bucks for a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac or you can download free Virtualization software from innotek called VirtualBox.

Apr 23, 2007. innotek today released a beta version VirtualBox for OS X, bringing its highly successful open source virtualization package to the Apple Macintosh platform. OS X is the third major platform that VirtualBox supports and Mac users can now benefit from the most powerful and best performing virtualization software on the market with the ease of use which Macintosh users have come to expect. VirtualBox for OS X is also the first professional virtualization product that is available free of charge, marking the start of a new era on the the Mac platform. VirtualBox for OS X is based on a beta of the upcoming VirtualBox 1.4 and is expected to be completed in the 2nd quarter of 2007.

Safari comes with OSX and is a fantastic browser from Apple….but I’ve been finding lately that Safari has been a little slow on my Powerbook (which is 3 years old so not unexpected). So I switched to Firefox and found it to be a little faster but slower than I’d like or expect…despite the fact that this laptop has 768mb of ram and is a 1.33ghz G4. I don’t really want to spring for more ram (which would cost about $150 for the necessary module) with the ever present rumours of Apple working on a new sub-notebook. I’d love a 10″MacBook…which means it probably won’t happen.

So what to do? I decided to try Camino. I’ve used it before on my iMac, mostly as a third browser to test sites with and confirm that caching isn’t in effect while working on something. There have been a number of articles recently about Safari’s sluggishness and ways of speeding up OSX surfing so it seemed like a good place to start.

So far it’s pretty peppy and as good or better than Firefox performance on this machine. Another nice benefit is the fact that Wordpress (the system we use to post here on Switching to Mac) and a few other things work the way you’d expect them to under Camino - including Google Docs & Spreadsheets which doesn’t currently work with Safari.

It’s not perfect. Some things don’t render properly - but that is mostly sloppy coding’s fault on some websites. It also doesn’t handle RSS feeds at all (compared to Safari’s great RSS support) but it’s free and is updated pretty regularly.

If you’ve got an older machine, or if you want to try something different, try it out and see if it runs things a little better…give it a shot and post your experiences here.

I’ve been meaning to write this post all week but just haven’t had a chance until now.

So it’s ironic that today of all days to write about Quicktime and codecs, Apple has announced support for Xvid on their site. This is interesting because as Apple and it’s partners add more support to Quicktime, it could have some positive implications for the Apple TV and the formats it supports.

The topic of this post is actually to talk about a cool open-source (free) addon that I found called Perian. It’s for Quicktime that allows it to support a bunch of other video codecs and actually makes it easier for you to play back all those video files you have. This should be especially useful for switchers that may have a library of video with varying formats from their PCs.

Perian adds support within Quicktime for these codecs:

• AVI
• FLV (think YouTube videos)
• 3ivX, DivX, Flash Screen Video, MS-MPEG4, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6, and Xvid
• AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio using A52Codec, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3

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