Macbook Air, Windows on an external drive

garroad_ran

I have a 2013 Macbook Air running OSX Mavericks.
On a recent trip home I was able to pick up the hard drives from my PC, but bringing the whole machine was unfeasible. I have some (Windows only) software on those discs that I'd like to be able to use.

I'm wondering if it might be possible to hook up an HD using an external enclosure to my Macbook, and run Boot camp or something similar to be able to work with the software and data I have stored on there. My question is: is this possible? I've never used boot camp so I really have no idea how it works.

Alternatively, I'd have to build or purchase a whole other machine, and I feel like that would be both more expensive and much more laborious.

Gdiguy

It should be easier than actually building a new machine - your options for running Windows programs on a MacBook are basically Bootcamp or some sort of virtual machine. Bootcamp is basically a dual boot (so you actually boot into windows or osX); VM lets you run Windows from within osX. So it sort of depends - would you rather be able to run your windows programs basically just as any other osx program (and be able to copy/paste between osx and windows programs, etc), or would you rather just cleanly boot into windows and go from there (and thus have less overhead from osX running as well)?

I'm currently using Parallels to run a Windows 7 virtual machine on my air (I actually have the entire windows 7 virtual machine running off an external SSD), largely because of the same issue (I have some custom software, as well as the full Adobe suite that I didn't want to re-buy), but I think there's a few other VM software options (VMWare I've also heard good things about).

The only major issue I can see in your case is that both cases basically require a clean windows install as the first step; I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to transfer already installed software to a Boot Camp or VM windows install. If you're willing to re-install them on a clean windows setup, though, it should be pretty easy. (This isn't really an osX/windows issue, it would be the same problem as taking an old hard drive into a new PC... how easy to deal with it is going to highly depend on the program).

Good luck! I find it kind of fun, but I get all sorts of crap for running Powerpoint via Windows on my air

nexuscrawler

FYI without some serious work bootcamp doesn't work on external drives by default

garroad_ran

Alright, so it looks like this is going to end up being far more trouble than it's worth (particularly having to get my parents to dig up the install disks back home and ship them to me).

Thank you both!