Back in 1984, I was the 24th person in Indiana to get a Macintosh computer. The machine I got was one of the original Macs, so it had very limited memory, talked to almost no peripherals, lacked a hard drive, and was hamstrung in many ways. But that machine started my love affair with the Macintosh.

Over the years, I was in environments where I needed to use Windows computers. I was involved with the evolution of almost every iteration of Windows. I remember rooting for the GEM Operating Environment to become the standard instead of Windows…a bet that I sadly lost.

Eventually, as my Macs aged and my business demands increased my entire family migrated to the Windows platform. It wasn’t so much out of love, but rather pure economics. I was a Microsoft Developer, so I had access to software at bargain basement pricing. I could get the latest version of the operating system for a huge discount. And I was able to make our Windows hardware last a long time, handing down machines to the kids year after year as my business grew and the power demands increased. With each new machine, we became more and more entrenched in the WinTel platform.

But I kept seeing the same Apple Macintosh ads you saw. When the iPad jumped onto the scene, I was caught up in the buzz. I scrimped and saved, skipping take-out lunches and putting the money in a jar marked Jeff’s iPad. During my daughter’s freshman year of college we both got iPads from the first generation. I remember the entire unboxing experience. I even took pictures, the first time I’ve ever done that unboxing a piece of tech.

My love of Apple’s design and implementation was rekindled. Although it took me a while to abandon my Android phone, in February of 2014 I got my first iPhone. By April of last year, I’d scrimped and saved enough to buy a MacBook Pro. At the time, I was simply replacing my aged Dell notebook computer. I knew that the Dell wasn’t going to last much longer, so I convinced myself to hop back on the Apple bandwagon.

Within a few short months, things got crazier at Hectic Manor, and I found myself traveling to New Jersey to stay with my daughter and grandson for ten days to two weeks at a stretch, then coming back home for a couple of days, then repeating the cycle. I became more and more dependent on my MacBook Pro. My tentative steps towards an office without walls morphed into a full-fledged conversion to running everything from my Mac. It didn’t matter if I was sitting by the bay in Castine, Maine or watching Hectic Grandson in an apartment in Jersey City, or by a military base in rural Missouri. No matter where I went, I could do almost everything on my Mac.

There was one glaring exception: Quicken for Windows. I’ve been using a variant of Quicken under the DOS operating system on PCs and later Windows for more years that I can remember. Actually, I wrote about Quicken before. It’s the one tool that I couldn’t find a replacement for in the Mac world. I tried Quicken for Mac and hated it. There are very few programs that I hate, tons that I dislike heartily, but almost none that I hate. Using Quicken for Mac was like going back to the 1980’s. It was like going back to the 1980’s and dial-up 2400-baud modems. It was like washing with acne-cleansing face washes from that era. It was awful!

I finally broke down and decided that I would use Bootcamp on my Mac. If you’re not familiar with Bootcamp, Apple has a fairly good description of what it is. In short, Bootcamp allows you to setup your Mac so you can boot into either the MacOS or another operating system. In my case, that was Windows. Since I didn’t know of another way to solve my dependence on the Quicken version for Windows, I partitioned my disk, installed Bootcamp, then Windows, and finally Quicken. I backed up my Quicken data and moved it to my MacBook Pro.

On my very next trip to New Jersey, I entered all our financial data directly on my Mac. Any receipts that were generated at home were photographed and texted to me and I entered them remotely. I was able to keep up with our finances while on the road without having connect to my office PC and battle all the issues that I’d been having using remote connectivity software.

I was glad to have a solution, but I wasn’t enamored of it. The main problem was that switching back and forth between the Mac environment and the Windows environment meant I had to reboot the computer. It didn’t take all that long, but it was a step that seemed unnecessary to me. It added enough friction that it grated on me every day. I have a tendency to want to look things up in Quicken all the time. I want to add receipts as I get them. When I make an online purchase, I want to record it as soon as I can, lest I forget.

It got to the point that I installed Quicken Mobile on my iPad so I could have access to much of that capability throughout the day. But Quicken Mobile is somewhat flaky. The ability to photograph receipts and store them in Quicken sounds great, but in actual usage the app would lock up often enough that I got frustrated. I couldn’t do all the searches that I could in native Quicken for Windows. And sometimes the data wouldn’t sync. Overall, Quicken Mobile wasn’t the solution for me.

About the same time, one of my daughters called from work asking about ways to run Windows programs on a Mac. They had a vendor who only had a Windows version of their program. It was one they ran throughout the day, so they couldn’t use Bootcamp to switch operating environments.

Using that request as a springboard, coupled with my frustration with Quicken for Windows under Bootcamp I began to investigate solutions. Fortunately, I discovered Parallels Desktop for Mac. Within a few hours of discovering the program I had downloaded a Try Now copy and recommended the same software to my daughter for her company. I quickly migrated my Quicken for Windows and it’s data to a Parallels Desktop for Mac installation. When the trial ended I purchased a full version.

The simplest description of the software is that it creates a PC within your Mac. You can either run in full-screen mode, so your Mac has the look and feel of a standard Windows computer, or you can run in window mode, where your Windows installation runs in a window on your desktop. There is even a mode, called Coherence, where your Windows applications appear as regular icons on your Mac desktop and act like Mac applications running in their own private windows.

Over the past year, I have come a tiny handful of Windows programs that I still need to run. In each case, I’ve been able to install the programs in Windows running in the Parallels Desktop for Mac environment.

I’ve also discovered that as we retire computers in our household and task them in new ways, I can create a virtual version of those computers right before I wipe their hard disks. While we’ve never had to go back to a machine to find a program or data the we don’t have access to elsewhere, it’s reassuring to know that I can if I need to. I have a 5TB USB drive that holds virtual versions of the last five computers that we re-assigned. If we encounter a situation where I need to get back to one of them, I can boot the virtual computer into Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac.

The installation and setup of Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac is easy. There’s a Try Now version that allows you to try 100% of the features for 14 days. While it’s a bit expensive at around $60, the functionality that it provides has been worth every penny to me.

I’ve used Parallels to test Windows 8.1 and I even did an installation of Unix to solve a problem for a friend. The creation of new virtual machines is sufficiently easy that I’ve completely stopped creating them elsewhere. While the whole idea of virtual machines for a particular purpose is pretty nerdy, it’s something that I’ve been doing for a while. It’s nice to know that I can do it quickly on my Mac using Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac.

Overall, I love this solution to a real-world problem that was plaguing me! If you’re looking for a way to run a Windows program without having to reboot your Mac, I would strongly recommend you checkout Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac.