I’ve been longing to be able to run Pro/E (the 3D mechanical CAD software that I use for product design) on a Mac for many years, basically ever since I started using Pro/E. With Apple’s move to the Intel architecture, it’s subsequent public beta of Boot Camp (which runs Windows in a separate partition and enables the option of booting into either MacOS or Windows), and the release of Parallels (which allows Mac users to run Windows without having to reboot), running Pro/E on a Mac had finally become a reality.

Although I follow the tech industry very closely, I’m generally not one of the earliest adopters of new technologies - I don’t even have an HD TV yet! So I waited until things had progressed far enough that I could be highly confident that I could get Pro/E running before I plunked down my hard-earned money on a new Mac.

Well, I made that plunk this week and have in front of me my newest toy - a screaming fast 15.4″ MacBook Pro with a 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and 256MB graphics card. Windows XP Pro is up and running via Boot Camp (installation was a breeze!), and although I bought a copy of Parallels, I haven’t gotten around to installing it yet. Parallels currently does not support direct hardware acceleration (but they supposedly will introduce this early next year) so I’ll likely have to run Pro/E through Boot Camp for a while. I don’t expect many problems installing Pro/E (I know someone who was able to do it without any problems); I’m more worried about being able to get Pro/E to communicate over the corporate VPN to obtain a license from our floating license server. More updates to come…

Posted by Roger at 6:43 pm.