by Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian

One of the great online services Jenkins provides to its members is Lexis Thru Jenkins (LTJ). You get desktop access to Lexis for 20 minutes every 24 hours. It's a great way for solos, and those at small firms with 10 or fewer attorneys, to have Lexis while minimizing online subscription fees.

Right now there's only a Windows version of the LTJ software. But we've had many members inquire about using LTJ on a Mac. Can it be done? Yup ... and you can do it 2 different ways. Here's how.

PLEASE NOTE: Both of the following methods require you to purchase a full version of Windows. You can elect to buy the Home Editions of either Windows XP (Service Pack 2) or Vista (Service Pack 1). I recommend Windows XP (if you can find it) because it’s smaller and less bloated than Vista. But it’s your choice. Both will cost you around $199.

Method #1 - Boot Camp

Boot Camp is a free utility application that is part of Mac OS X 10.5, known as Leopard. It lets you switch from running Mac OS X to Windows.

For the record, my two-year-old iMac is running OS X version 10.5.6. I ran the Boot Camp Assistant to set up a Windows partition on my Mac's hard drive. There are full instructions on how to do this available here. Since I had chosen to use Windows XP, I created a 10 GB partition.

Next, I inserted the Windows CD into my Mac's CD/DVD drive. WIndows' installation tool then took over. I elected to format my new Windows partition with the FAT32 file system. I used FAT so that I could drag files back and forth between the Windows and Mac partitions. You can't do that with the NTFS file system, which is your other formatting option.

Creating and formatting the partition took about 15 minutes. It took another half-hour to install the Windows software. At that point I was running Windows on a Mac. But it looked dorky -- the icons and fonts were huge and crude-looking. I needed to install the proper drivers for my Mac. All I had to do was insert the Leopard DVD into my Mac's drive. It contained a Mac driver installer which made everything look pretty. Total time: about an hour. Honestly, I can't complain about that.

Since I'm only using Windows for LTJ access, I didn't bother to update XP to Service Pack 3 or install my printer driver. I also didn't upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 (IE6 ships with XP). I even decided to live life on the edge and didn't install anti-virus software. If my Windows partition gets infected, I'll just wipe it and reinstall Windows. It won't affect my Mac partition, anyway. I also didn't install applications such as Adobe Acrobat or MS Office, since I'll be dragging any documents I download from LTJ onto my Mac. These choices probably saved me at least another couple of hours of twiddling my thumbs while waiting for software to load.

Next I connected to my wireless network, opened IE, and went to jenkinslaw.org. I downloaded and ran the LTJ software. Boom ... I was in LTJ!

Windows ran very peppy on my Mac. About the only downside to this method is that you have to reboot every time you want to switch to and from Windows. Total cost (assuming you have a Mac running OS X 10.5 Leopard): $199.

Method #2 - Virtualization

You can run Windows in what's known as a "virtual machine" on your Mac. When you do that, Windows runs just like any other application on your Mac.

I downloaded and installed free trials of the 2 most popular Mac virtualization applications: Parallels 4.0 (2 week trial) and VMWare Fusion 2.0.1 (30 day test drive). These applications each cost $79.

When I launched them, they both immediately found my Boot Camp Windows partition and created a virtual machine from it. This is nice -- I didn't have to install Windows for each application. I don't know how hard/easy it would have been to create a virtual machine for Windows from scratch, without Boot Camp. In the end, it might be a good idea to set up the partition in Boot Camp, then use one of the virtualization apps for your every day Windows use.

At any rate, Windows and LTJ were now running in a window on my Mac. Cool! Both applications were very similar, at least as far as what I was using them for. (They have a ton of features, most of which I'll never need.) Unlike other bloggers, I prefer Parallels over Fusion, for the following reasons:

• In Parallels, I can download a document from LTJ directly onto my Mac partition. I couldn't do this in Fusion.

• Fusion makes me enter my Mac password every time I run Windows. (There may be a way to circumvent this; I admit I haven't looked very hard.)

• In Fusion, the mouse pointer disappears during boot, so you can't do anything else while it loads Windows.

Windows runs slower when virtualized. However, not having to reboot each time I want to use LTJ sure is a plus. Total cost (again, assuming you have a Mac running OS X 10.5 Leopard): $278.

Postscript: If you’re interested in running Windows (and LTJ) on a Mac, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of David Pogue’s Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual. Chapter 8 has complete details, including screen captures.

CAVEAT: People higher than myself in the Jenkins chain-of-command have urged me to state that Jenkins cannot offer support for installing or running Boot Camp, Parallels, Fusion, or Windows.