Transcript
Micah Sargent (0:00)
Coming up on Hands On Tech, let's take a look at how we can run old software on a new machine, especially when we're going from Windows to Mac. Stay tuned. This is twit. Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. I am Micah Sargent, and today, as we tend to do here on the show, I am taking your tech questions and answering them because could you believe this week's question comes in from Joe, who writes, I just bought a new MacBook Air M4. I have a Lenovo laptop running Windows and have a legitimate copy I paid for of Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS3 installed on the Lenovo. I know these programs are old, but they're still part of my digital workflow for photography. Is there any way I can install Lightroom in Photoshop, the Windows version on my MacBook Air M4? So, Joe, this is a great question and I understand wanting to be able to use the software that you've purchased, that you own, that you paid for. And unfortunately, making the switch between one major operating system to another and the hardware changes that come with it makes for a kind of complicated situation because you can't directly install, of course, the Windows versions of Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS3 on this MacBook Air. But even more so, there are some other issues. You know, we know that because it's Windows only, you can't run them natively on macOS. But even with virtualization, CS3 and Lightroom 3 are rather old from like 2007 or 2008 and therefore don't have the compatibility that a more modern version of the software would have. It could be that the virtualization software doesn't have the necessary compatibility for the software you're trying to install, or vice versa, that the software you're trying to install doesn't have the necessary sort of things in place to make it so that it can run with some virtualization Software. Plus, your M4 chip uses the ARM architecture and these older programs designed for x86 processors. So a little bit difficult when it comes to using these more aged apps. But let's talk about it. Let's talk about it just in case. Maybe, maybe virtualization would work. Maybe you could try running Windows in a virtual machine. There are a couple of options available to you. Parallels Desktop, which is pretty popular, well known, and VMware Fusion. VMware Fusion. We'll include links in the show notes to both. The VMware company has a bunch of different software and so it can be kind of hard to find exactly what you're looking for. But VMware Fusion for Mac is what you would eventually end up wanting to try. I would recommend trying these if you want to go ahead and go forth. Of course you do need a Windows license in order to install Windows on the virtualized portion on your Mac. And you would of course need to be aware that the performance of these applications is going to be reduced because you are virtualizing the experience. And as I mentioned before, the compatibility issues are likely going to be the thing that stops you from being able to do this. Because even if you were running Windows on arm, you would still probably have issues trying to run this older software. And then last but not least, graphic acceleration that the M4 has probably not going to work with this old software either. So you would have not just the impact of virtualizing, but then further the impact of that lack of graphics acceleration that even if you could get them working would make for such a slow experience that it probably would not be worth it in the end. Something that I considered maybe doing potentially, I'm not sure with software that's this old, you could see if Adobe would let you use the Mac versions of these programs. If you were able to access the Mac versions of these programs from Adobe, you could maybe possibly use your license with the Mac versions. Again, I don't know that that's going to be the case, but it's worth checking and asking Adobe support you must. And so being able to find the Mac versions of these but the caveat there is under no circumstances should you go to a random website that says it's got, you know, lightroom and Photoshop CS3 and download them from there. Don't do that. But yes, potentially talk to Adobe about transferring your license to the Mac version. Will that work? I don't know, but I'd love to know, you know, if that ends up working for you.