Choosing virtual machine product for Windows on Mac

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I  just acquired my first true Mac product – a new MacBook Air with M4 – and have been blithely planning to start running Quicken on it instead of on my PC. Then I discovered that the Quicken data file conversion fails, and when I dig into the situation I find to my horror that Quicken Support can’t help!!  If the file fails “Validate”, you’re basically SOL – it’s unbelievable that they are unable to write code that can clean up a data file, but there it is.

SO. I have two choices: starting over from scratch is fine except recreating manually all the million and one details, like categories, tags, and reports is not trivial – many hours work. Also it is impossible to recover 20 years of accumulated data. What about a backup? Well, yes, I got backups, but none of them validate either, even going back a long time!

Which leads me, very reluctantly, to the idea of running Windows in a VM so I can run my existing Quicken file,  which by the way, works perfectly well on Windows, despite being “corrupt”. The idea of going over to a Mac was of course to get away from Windows, but I have to evaluate the idea further I guess.

Folks on this site have praised Parallels so I took a read about that, and they do support the M4 architecture but only Windows 11 (adding insult to injury! 🙂 ). It’s not cheap – $99 a year subscription, but as far as I’ve been able to discover, no other VM product supports the M4 chip yet.

Advice and recommendations welcome!

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I run Windows 11 Pro on ARM in Parallels VMs on several Macs including an M1 MacMini and a  17″ M2Max MaBook Pro. I have yet to set it up on my new M4Pro MacMini, but soon. (I have also run everything from XP to Win10 in Parallels VMs on Intel Macs.

The first thing you have to understand about Apple Silicons Macs is, you are not running the same Windows you have been using on your Intel or AMD based hardware installed conputers. You have to run Windows 11 on ARM (Win10 is not available on ARM based architecture). It is a different architecture. It is not an NTFS file system. Some applications have been reconfigured to run on ARM (ex. Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC Player, Adobe Reader, Libre Office, etc) To run your application, you will need an ARM version, or you will need a translator/emulator such as Rosetta, WINE, or Crossover. Even so, not all applications work properly. My tax software does not. I am still running it on Win10 in Parallels on an Intel-based Mac.

Running Parallels on a Mac requires careful consideration.  It’s not practical on the Mac base models. You need enough processing power to run TWO Operating Systems at the same time. You also need enough RAM to give each system a reasonable amount – consider 8GB minimum each, but more is better. If you have an SSD, you also need disk space for both OSs, leaving enough room empty so you don’t read/write your SSD to death and limit its life span. (I use as a minimum an upgrade from the minimum processor, at least 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD)

You do not necessarily need the Pro version of Parallels for home use. I use the Standard version, which is not a subscription and does not expire each year. And I get a reasonable discount for an Upgrade to the next version, which I can purchase on my time schedule since it doesn’t expire on a given date.

Backing up a VM is a piece of cake. You can copy the .pvm file to an external disk. Restore is just copying it back to the Mac. I back up my User files from the Mac to an external disk, but I do not back up the OS. Restore involves a reinstall from Apple, a reinstall of the Apps from the App Store or the third-party install files that back up to the external drive, and syncing the personal files from backup.

 

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Thank you for the detailed explanation! However it sounds like my idea might not work then – I’d have to try it to see if Quicken for windows would run in the new environment, which means installing everything and figuring out all the wrinkles with Parallels and Win 11 before trying the Quicken install. Yikes!

On the Parallels website, the standard product is now listed at $99/yr but there’s also a Mac App Store version which I’m confused about – it seems to somehow be different from the standard product but still says “in-app purchases” of $99!

Are there other apps that could do the same thing? I saw there’s something called Bootcamp??

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To my knowledge, Bootcamp does not work on ARM-based Apple Silicon. Bootcamp worked when the architecture was the same (x86 = Intel/AMD processors). Apple Silicon is ARM-based architecture – a different animal.

Does Quicken have an ARM version? You are not working with the standard x86 versions of applications in most cases. You can check out WINE and Crossover and see if they claim to run Quicken on Apple Silicon. I am still running my tax software in a Parallels VM on aWin10 on an Intel Mac. But it is not the common on-the-shelf app like Quicken or H&R Block. They do not have an ARM version, so next year will be a change for me, either the software itself or file on online.

I deal with Parallels directly for the purchase of their software, not the Apple Store. You may pay the full price the first year for the Standard version (or you may catch a discount), but they offer a good discount from there on for “upgrades.” And because it is a “perpetual” version, it doesn’t expire yearly, so you can keep using it longer than a year.

 

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@PKCano – thanks for the clarification – I looked into Crossover and that seems more promising – they specifically list Quicken Classic as supported which is great, plus they don’t need a Windows license which is even better. I just need the simplest possible solution if I’m going to try to run the old product on the Mac, and Crossover seems worth a trial run.

as always, thank you for all the info and advice!

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peterb wrote:

they do support the M4 architecture but only Windows 11 (adding insult to injury! )

There is no insult. Silicon Macs run only Qualcomm ARM version of Windows 11 (Microsoft hasn’t released x64 for Apple silicon).

* x64 software run in emulation on Qualcomm ARM.

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@Alex5723 – Sorry, please pardon my mild sarcasm – I mean that here I am trying to move off Windows, yet this would force me to not only stay on Windows but to actually move to Win 11 which I’ve also been trying to avoid.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Alex5723

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Fallback plan b.  What Windows system do you have now and how healthy is the hardware? Does it need to go online or will is serve as your Quicken machine that you can remote into on your local network?

(rdp app on a mac works wonderfully to remote into a windows pc)

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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It’s a fair question! I have a  Dell Precision 3431 desktop running Windows 10 22H2 and it has been iffy from Day One – I say it may be haunted because it periodically crashes despite keeping up with Windows and driver updates, and prior Dell and MS tech support help and has been rebuilt twice, once from scratch. Since I removed Norton it has been strangely stable, so maybe …..

Interesting idea about rdp – I can try that!

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Hmm, I ran into an interesting issue – how do I log in via rdp to my Microsoft account profile on the PC when it’s a passwordless account? It wouldn’t accept a blank password and I didn’t get the push notification I usually get.

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