[andy.lippman_422]

Nope. Just get a PC.

[ruszja]

I use a MacBook Pro with the midrange AMD graphics and the professional version of Parallels to run PACS for different hospitals. Each has its own windows install with the environment required for that PACS. That way the different VPN clients and hospital required antivirus solutions don’t interfere. You just run all of them and toggle back and forth between the virtuals. The Mac runs hot enoughto fry eggs on it and sounds like a jet engine with all the fans running when I do that.

I wish I could say it’s trouble free. There are known incompatibilities involving Parallels , Citrix and Microsoft’s DirectX and it required some tweaking to get it stable. It’s a very expensive solution to get a mediocre PC. My Macbook is Intel based, I don’t know whether this approach works with a M1 based Macbook at all.

My preferred solution is a Windows PC running “VMWare Workstation’ as a hypervisor. Then run PACS/EMR/Dictation in a Windows Virtual specific to the hospitals required environment. That allows you to make changes to the virtual and keep a stable version as backup. If it gets corrupted you can just reinstall the stable virtual.

Performance wise nothing beats running PACS natively on a PC.

[ruszja]

Idupe

[benoit.elens]

Thanks for the replies….think going PC will just make life less complicated.  Will just lug 2 laptops when I really need to.  I’m not as tech savvy as some on here so need to find something that’s simple.

[andy.lippman_422]

For a while I used bootcamp which was more or less fine with minor driver issues and stuff, but it’s a native Win install. No VM solution has really ever had the speed to really read well because most PACS are so poorly optimized. On ARM Macs, it’s just not an option, period. PC only if you plan to do any radiology on it. I love the ARM Macs for my personal laptops though, great power for the heat/battery draw.

[radiologistkahraman_799]

Definitely PC route.  It just isn’t worth the headache of bootcamp/etc.  

[ruszja]

If you have an issue where using virtualized installs is helpful, get ‘VMWare workstation’ and run the PACS/Dictation/EMR inside of that. That way you can put the hospital required AV and VPN inside the virtual and it doesn’t eff with your private use of the laptop.

[andy.lippman_422]

That would be a nice solution, unfortunately PACS usually runs like crap in VMWare. A solution might be maybe a second GPU that you could pass off the VM but I haven’t really tried that. What I usually do is I use VMs to run PS360 instances and the map the folders to my host drive. That way I can run two PACS on bare metal, one PACS talks to the bare metal PS360, the other PACS talks to the VM PS360.