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Have you ever wanted to play Windows games on your Mac? Well if you have an Intel powered Mac running a Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later operating system you can run a complete Windows operation system such as Windows XP in parallel with your normal Mac operating system. With the Windows operating system installed on your Mac you can than play those Windows Game in fact you can run any Windows program.

To install Windows on your Mac you will first need to install the Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac software on your system. To successfully run the Parallels Desktop software on your Mac you must have the following:-

• Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later. To check what version of Mac OS X you have got, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu in the menu bar.

• An Intel-powered Core™ Duo or Core™ Solo Mac® Mini, iMac®, MacBook™, MacBook Pro or Mac Pro.

• A minimum of 768MB of RAM but 1GB is recommended.

• About 200 MB of hard disk space on the boot volume for Parallels Desktop installation.

• Sufficient space on your hard disks to allocate for the virtual machines, i.e. 15 GB of hard disk space is recommended for each virtual machine.

Installing Parallels Desktop software on your Mac is not difficult. When it is installed you can then use it to install what it calls the Guest operation systems i.e. the other operating system such as Windows XP or Vista or even Linux that you want to run at the same time as your Mac operating system. You can install any of the Windows operating systems but there is a Windows Express Installation Assistant especially for Windows XP and Windows Vista. You can also install using Typical or Custom installation settings. During the installation process you will be instructed to insert the CD or DVD containing the Operating System software you want installed, such as the Windows XP Operating System disk.

When the Guest operating system is installed it will run in a window on your Mac screen. When you run an application in the virtual machine with Windows installed, the running application's icon appears in the Dock by default. If you want this application icon to remain in the Dock even when it or the virtual machine are not running simply Right-click (Control-click) the applications icon in the Dock, and select Keep in Dock. If you then click the Windows application's icon in the Dock it launches the virtual machine and then the Windows application. In this way you can have the icon for your favourite Windows Game in the Dock and simply click it when you want to play that game.

If you follow the above procedure you will be in a position to install and run all of those Windows Games that you wanted to play, as well as install and run any other Windows applications.