ACCU-CHEK® 360° diabetes management system in Virtual Machine on a Mac?

Has anyone tried using the ACCU-CHEK® 360° diabetes management system software in a Windows 7 virtual machine on a Mac (parallels or VMWare)?

I have and it worked fine, if you use a Dex then cheaper and easier to use bootcamp. Dex will not always work with Parallels or VMWare (although some have had success, but not me).

Hi Chas,

My Macs were not purchased with the intention of running another OS on the local disk via bootcamp.

The Mac -- a 27" iMac (32GB RAM, 3.5GHz i7, 256GB SSD) -- was bought to be fast machine for photography (try combining 20 16MP images in Photoshop) and all of my files -- photos, music, video, documents -- are stored externally. The internal drive was meant to hold the OS and the applications only. There is very little space to install a secondary OS (64bit Windows will require 20GB minimum for the VM). Dual booting Windows wasn't in the plan when I purchased the iMac because I have no use for Windows at home. The SSD has about 90GB free after I installed all the Mac software I normally use. That would be ~ 70GB after Windows.

I had thought that I could install VM Ware and create a VM on the 11TB of external storage. The VM disk access would be sub optimal but workable for downloading CGMS and glucometer/pump data for charting and to give to my endo.

After researching this some more it seems the cost of buying a Windows 7 machine just for downloading data would be high (over $600). I have no use for Windows.

A copy of Windows 7 is $100 (Home edition) on Amazon. The 360 software is $35. The VMWare option seemed ideal but Roche said they hadn't tested it -- I spoke with technical support -- and some customers reported issues.

Now ... if there is a way to boot a Mac into Windows 7/8 from an external drive ... that would be great.

Oh damn!

Can I install Windows on an external drive?
No. Installing Boot Camp on an external hard drive is not supported.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5639

May be cheaper to add a standard hard drive to your Mac, in addition to what you have today. Or even try a Win Laptop to do the downloads ?.

With the issues I had with Dexcom i've now removed VMWare and moved to a Win Laptop for downloading.

The move toward super thin – this is an industry wide trend – means the memory and solid state drives are soldered to the motherboard. The newer Macs do not have upgradeable drives or memory. I’m not buying a Windows laptop just to run the software. I have no use for Windows. Does it make sense to spend $$$ just to do this?

I don’t think it does, so sadly I don’t use the AccuChek 360 SW.

Of course, the last time I touched it … 2008(?), I didn’t like it anyway, so there was little incentive for me to spend extra $$$ to look at something that wasn’t useful.