Mac users: best solution for windows emulator?

[SanPancho]

long story short- I have a iMac running win 8 via bootcamp. that's my regular office/work computer. it basically stays in windows 24/7. at home I now have another iMac and would like to be able to port into my work computer when I need to do quick tasks without having to run across town.

however- something about win 10, or Mojave, or I-dunno-what is making it freakin horrible to try and install windows via bootcamp. huge pain. I've solved two or three issues only to run into another one. searching the web, and "solutions" start getting way too technical for me. I'm at the point where I figure I;d just rather not try and force it.

so-- all I'd really like is to be able to remote connect to my work desktop from time to time and to be able to use my google apps (drive, sheets, etc) from the home iMac.

im not averse to just paying for some software given how insane it seems to be now trying to get windows installed on Mojave. im going to say upfront that "parallels" is a no-go as I refuse to pay for "subscriptions" instead of licenses.

so all that said, I'm looking for a solution that is pretty much plug and play, or at least not requiring too much technical Mac/os knowledge, and that should let me do the most important part smoothly, which is remote connect to the office /win 8 machine.

thanks

 

[AF1HomeBrew]

Have you tried Parallels? With this you can run Windows within OSX.

 

[AF1HomeBrew]

...Sorry, I didn't see you complaint about Parallels. It is pretty slick though.

I'm a Windows user, and bought a MB Pro a few months ago and have been playing with Parallels w/ Windows 10 installed. It's pretty nice. Unfortunately all programs are going the subscription route.

 

[SanPancho]

Yeah but i feel its not worth it given how infrequently ill be using it (i hope).

Just found out you can use remote desktop on a mac, so gonna see if that works for me. At that point, ill be good enough. Have figured out how to utilize the google apps which is good enough for now.

 

[SoulToast]

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Virtualbox!

It'll run anything* on anything*. You can even have it run headless in the background and RD into it if you're feeling frisky.

No subscriptions, nice and free. I've found it very easy to configure and re-configure. You can re-allocate resources as needed to adjust how much RAM or HD space it's using.

Don't have to shutdown and reboot to switch, just fire it up as needed.

I've been running it for a few years in various applications, the most heavy lifting it did was running Windows Server 2012 on a host Linux system. The kicker was that the VM took less time to boot up than it did when it was running directly on the bare metal. It was set up to start when the system did, and it was up and running in less than five minutes compared to the 20+ minute shutdown and startup before I switched it.

 

[SanPancho]

yeah the thing is I don't need to actually run windows on this Mac. I just need to port in to my work computer that is running windows. so while I could use a windows emulator, it was recently pointed out to me that I don't even need to bother.

first they said use the Remote Desktop function on windows. but you need a static ip or a dns service and I don't wanna deal with that.

so somebody recommended something called Teamviewer. and they've got a free version for personal use, so I just set that up. took all of 3 minutes. seems pretty easy to use.