I was going to write this great step-by-step guide to getting Windows applications running on a Mac when I discovered those instructions have already been written by Apple: Boot Camp Installation and Setup Guide. I highly recommend reading and following them! (I didn’t and had to start the whole process over twice.)

In the end, here’s what I did:

  1. using the Boot Camp Assistant already installed by default on my Mac, created a 10 GB partition on my Mac for Windows.
  2. started from within BCA, installed Windows XP on that partition. (This is where the Apple guide comes in very handy.)
  3. rebooted a dozen times while Windows did its thing with all the updates and patches and what-not. (All the things you didn’t think you’d ever have to deal with again because you live on a Mac now.)
  4. on the PC, installed the PC applications I wanted (SPSS in this case)
  5. on the Mac, installed VMWare Fusion so that I can run the PC partition from within the Mac partition. (VMWare Fusion does the same thing as Parallels.) At this point the PC was running within a single window on the Mac.
  6. clicked on that amazing “Unity” button within VMWare Fusion, and voila, the PC applications are now running along side my Mac applications.

Mission Accomplished: a PC-licensed copy of SPSS is living along side a Mac-licensed copy of MSOffice (Excel and Word).