Best Windows Emulation

Hey all. A guy I know bravely bought a new MacBook Pro to be the first one in his all-Windows company to have a Mac. While it would still have an XP Pro desktop PC in his office, the MacBook would be his primary roaming PC and he still needed to be able to access the same services and files as his office PC at least time to time. I installed MS Office for Mac, which took care of the bulk of his needs, and the built-in Mac email client handled his IMAP needs, though not quite as nicely as Thunderbird. He also needed to access some WordPerfect-created files occasionally and I discovered that this Mac word processor called Nisus Writer worked well for that.

The big problem turned out to be a Citrix Metaframe- based proprietary app by a company called Yardi. Even though Citrix clients are available in virtually all platforms, including Macs, and that the idea is to have the application independent of the client OS, the Yardi implimentation is very sketchy at best and they only support Windows 2k & XP (98 appears to work fine though). The Mac Citrix client goes nowhere with the same settings as the Widows client, and Yardi tech simply says they don't support Mac's.

I had been hoping to avoid using a Windows emulation package, but...well. I downloaded the Parallels product because I heard some good stuff about it, installed Windows XP, got all the updates, and was really impressed with the speed of it (it reboots faster than any "real" Widows XP pc I've seen). I installed the Windows Citrix client and....still no go. I acts like it's going to login into Yardi but then complains it can't find the server at the specified address. It's a useless error message.

A temporary workaround has been to use remote desktop to have the Mac control the office PC and run its Citrix client from there, but that's kind of stupid.

I see that there are other Windows emulation packages out there, but the others seem to not have a trial version to try out first. I'm just wondering if you guys have had good-better luck with the other emulators with poorly implemented Windows apps.

Thanks in advance.

-BC