I know, nothing new, but it was new to me. For my new business I had to get quickbooks for accounting, as recommended by my accountant.
I'm a Macintosh guy. Quickbooks is Windows only.
So I figured, OK, rather than buy a new PC to be able to run Quickbooks, I could run windows in a virtual machine on my Mac and get Quickbooks installed on that. Sooo, I went to the store to buy a copy of XP Pro and I was shocked at the sticker price. (these are Canadian Dollars)
For a copy of XP Pro $400
For a copy of Vista Business $280
Microsoft produced a new operating system (Vista) that broke it's backwards compatibility with older programs. Thus most business users want to use XP which works with pretty much most software except a few bleeding edge software titles. Microsoft then makes you pay a premium for backward compatibility.
I ended up buying Vista since I just needed to run Quickbooks Pro 2009 which is fully compatible with Vista.
BTW, of the various Mac solutions for running XP, Bootcamp is fine and free which only requires you to partition your boot drive on the computer, of the two main virtual machine competitors: Parallels and VMware Fusion, the latter is very much the better choice as it's written in Cocoa as maximizes performance.
Any way, just a mini rant about having to buy Vista since I did not want to waste cash on XP Pro. BTW it's all running fine on my Mac, but is making me feel dirty. I even installed anti-virus software for the first time in 10 years and I hate all the pop-up's telling you that something needs fixed.
Siiiigggggghhhhhh.