In VirtualBox on Mac Air the installation lasts five minutes and the already installed system boots in 10 seconds or less. The distribution ISO takes around ~100 MB, and when installed ~250.

This is a very stripped-down version of XP SP3. A virtual machine hosting standard Windows usually takes a few gigabytes minimum and boots considerably slow. This is a good solution but with a drawback. What do Linux and Mac users have to do? Install Windows in a virtual machine and run RDP in there.

Indeed, there are RDP clients available for Linux and Mac, but it doesn’t help much because without that encrypted channel it just doesn’t have any meaning. It becomes complicated if the workstation is not Windows. You just go to a web site and logon, and then an ActiveX component gets started from the page, installs and runs everything required. Not a problem when a client workstation runs Windows. When that software is up and running, any application (telnet/ssh, ftp, radmin etc), including RDP client (mstsc.exe), might access to the remote network. To establish such connection, special software must be installed on a client workstation to create an encrypted tunnel between the workstation and the remote network. The problem – a need to connect to a remote network via RDP.

Windows xp emulator for mac