downloading mac files on a pc How to Open and Run EXE File on Mac. EXE files are not intended to work on Mac, but there are workarounds to this. You can now easily run any EXE file on your macOS using its inbuilt tools. The best part of it is it’s a very easy process. Sue Wayne. Jul 13, 2021 • Filed to: Solve Mac Problems • Proven solutions. Mac's impressive library of apps gives you everything you need but let's face it: Windows has a far larger library. Haven't you ever come across software native to Windows which endear itself to you? But since they all come with the EXE file extension, your Mac is incapable of running them. Well, there are workarounds to this problem and you'll learn about them today. It's possible to safely open and run EXE files on your Mac using mediums like Boot Camp, Remote Desktop, CrossOver, Virtual Machine, and WINE, to mention the most prominent ones. And you don't need to be an expert to do this. As long as you can follow simple instructions, you're all set. Part 1: Can You Run an EXE File on a Mac? Yes, you can! With how innovative and creative developers have become, it was only a matter of time before they devised a means to run EXE files on Mac, even though such files are incompatible with macOS. What's an EXE file, though? It's a file extension that denotes an executable file format. Okay, but what's an executable file? It's any file capable of being executed as a program. To put it simply, it's what makes the installation and running of software possible. EXE files are used in a few operating systems, the most notable of them being Microsoft Windows. You can think of EXE files as the Windows version of APP files (APP files, if you're unaware, are executable files under macOS). Running EXE files on Mac is very possible but only through backdoor means, so to speak. You need an emulator (WINE is by far the most popular), or you install a virtual machine software on your macOS to enable you to load Windows VM or make an extra partition on your disk where you can simultaneously have both macOS and Windows in your Mac. Part 2: How to Open EXE Files on Mac? Again, you have several options to choose from when attempting this. So many software out there can help you open EXE files on Mac. You are advised to go with the Parallel Desktop. Parallel Desktop. This software is simplistic and won't take up much on your time because it doesn't even require a Mac restart anytime you wish to run a Windows application. A copy of Microsoft Windows is required though. You have to install it on your hard disk but it's easy to do: Step 1: Windows Installation. Open up your Mac's Application folder and double-click on the "Parallels" icon (you have to do this to install Windows). Click on " File ". Click on " New ". Click on " Install Windows or another OS from DVD or image file ". Click on " Continue ". You can easily install Windows either from a DVD or the more popular .iso disc image; or even a bootable USB drive. You can even switch to the manual mode, locate the source for the Windows installation, and choose it by clicking on " Select a file… " Click on " Continue ". You will be taken to a Windows product key window. Leave the " Express installation " as it is, input the key and click " Continue ". You will be asked to select how you wish to use Windows: Whether for productivity, games only, software development, design, etc. Once you're done selecting, click on " Continue ". Type in a name for the virtual machine and select the directory or location for the Parallels Desktop. Click on " Continue " and the Windows installation will commence. All Intel-based Macs are compatible with both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows: From Windows XP to Windows 10. Once the installation concludes, you can open up Windows by clicking on the "Power" button in the list of the Parallels Virtual Machine. Step 2: Using Parallels Desktop. The very first time Windows restarts, "Parallels Tools" will be installed. This will be what ultimately integrates your Mac with your Windows desktops. After the installation is done, you will be asked to restart Windows. Open up your Parallels Desktop from "Spotlight.' Click on " Virtual Machine ". Select " Configure " in the drop-down menu which appears. Click on " Options ". Click on " Shared Folders ". Click on " Add ". Click on " Choose ". Doing this will add a location from your Mac's desktop to the virtual machine. Simply put any EXE file in this location to enable Windows to access and install them. Part 3: How to Run Windows APPs on Mac? The question now is not whether you want to run EXE files on your Mac, but rather how to go about it conveniently. There are countless of great Windows apps that never made it to macOS, and they probably never will. A lot of them have very attractive features that make Windows the envy of all Mac owners. Running EXE files on Mac is made easy and convenient via Boot Camp and Remote Desktop. You can use any. It depends on preference and what you find more convenient. Boot Camp. This application makes it possible for you to install Windows on your Mac . Switching between macOS and Windows thus becomes a matter of you restarting your system and deciding which OS to log into. Step 1: Windows Installation File. Boot Camp is compatible with Windows 8,8.1. and 10 (you will need an ISO file of any of these three releases). Step 2: Launch Your Mac's Utilities folder. Type in " Utilities " in your Mac's search bar, then click it. Step 3: Launch Boot Camp Assistant. The app's icon looks like a grey hard drive. Click it. Step 4: On-screen Instructions. You will be instructed to choose the Windows ISO, the drive you intend to install it on, and restart your Mac. Step 5: Your Mac Will Restart. Once you're done setting up Boot Camp, you will be asked to restart Mac. After that, you will be taken to the Windows installer screen. Step 6: Install Windows. Follow the instructions to install the version of Windows you chose. Step 7: Startup Manager. Once the install has been completed, your system will restart. Press and hold the " Option " key while this happens and the " Startup Manager " will appear. Let go of the " Option " key and you will see all the drives you can boot your Mac from. Step 8: Boot Camp. Select " Boot Camp " and click on " Return ". Your Mac will now be loaded into Windows. Navigate to your EXE file and run it. Remote Desktop. This free tool does what many others fail at: lets you take full advantage of your Windows apps from your Mac. That's pretty convenient, don't you agree? Even though you'll need Mac and PC to use the Remote Desktop, it's still a great software that deserves praise. Here's how you use it: Step 1: Get Your PC Ready. Open the start menu and navigate to " Settings ", then " System ", then " Remote Desktop ". Turn "Enable Remote Desktop" on and " Confirm ." Step 2: Know Your IP Address & PC Name. Still on the " Remote Desktop " menu, and below the " How to connect to this PC ", jot down your PC name. Go to your "Settings', then "Network & Internet". Click "Wi-Fi" and select the network you're connected to. This will bring up the network connection properties screen. At the bottom of the page is your "IPv4 address". Jot it down. Step 3: Install the Mac Version of Microsoft Remote Desktop. Pick up your Mac and open up your Mac App Store, then search for " Microsoft Remote Desktop ". Download and install it. Step 4: Open Add Your PC to Remote Desktop. Open up Remote Desktop on your Mac. Click on " Add Desktop ". A dialogue box will pop up. Type in the PC Name you jotted down; if it doesn't work, type in the IP address. Click " Save ". Step 5: You Can Now Connect. Keep your PC turned on and make sure it is connected to the network your Mac is connected to. Remote Desktop will now show your computer below " Saved Desktops ". Double-click on it to connect. You will be required to enter your username and password. Click " OK ". A security warning will pop up. Since you're on a private network, ignore the warning and click " Continue ". That's the last step. You can now view and use your Windows on your Mac via Remote Desktop. Closing Words. Well, there you have it. Running your EXE files via your Mac is now a thing of the past. As long as you have the right tools, you can do it in a matter of minutes. These tools make your Mac more versatile than even Apple intended and anticipated because they enable you to go beyond what your Mac is capable of doing. You can achieve an end goal that would have otherwise been impossible. That's the power of a Mac for you. How to Open Exe Files on Mac. This article was written by Jack Lloyd. Jack Lloyd is a Technology Writer and Editor for wikiHow. He has over two years of experience writing and editing technology-related articles. He is technology enthusiast and an English teacher. This article has been viewed 2,065,682 times. This wikiHow teaches you how to run Windows' executable (EXE) files on a Mac. To do so, you can either install WINE, which is free software, or install Windows 8 or 10 using your Mac's Boot Camp feature. How can I move files from a Mac to a Windows PC? I have a Mac and an external hard drive that includes some important family files. I bought a 4TB hard drive for my dad, and thought it would be easy to copy the files over so he could use them on his PC. However, my Mac doesn’t recognise his hard drive, and his PC won’t recognise my hard drive. Any suggestions? The hard drives should not be a problem, unless your computers are very old. Macs and Windows machines do have their own preferred file formats for internal hard drives, but external hard drives don’t always ship with these pre-installed. They tend to use a version of Microsoft’s FAT file format, which dates back to the MS DOS (or IBM PC DOS) operating system used by the IBM PC in 1981. Most operating systems can read files in these old formats. When DOS was born, popular hard drives only had 5MB or 10MB of storage space, which you could fill today with a single animated GIF. In 1996, Microsoft introduced FAT32 to handle much larger hard drives, and FAT32 is still in common use. However, hard drives keep getting bigger -- now they are typically 500GB to 4TB -- and in 2006, Microsoft released a new extended version, exFAT. In theory, this can handle drives up to 64 zettabytes, though 512TB is the recommended maximum. Hard drives will have to double in size another seven times to reach that. If your dad’s new 4TB EHD (external hard drive) has been formatted in FAT32 or exFAT, then both his PC and your Mac should be able to read it. All updated versions of Windows XP and later versions of Windows support both FAT32 and exFAT. Apple already supported FAT32 and it added support for exFAT in Mac OS X 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard) and later versions of OS X. Mac to PC file transfer using an ethernet cable. Even if the 4TB drive has been formatted in Windows’ NTFS (New Technology File System) format, then your Mac should still be able to read it, though it won’t be able to write to it. Apple added read-only support for NTFS in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and many Mac users need it for running Windows under Boot Camp. Your dad can check the format of his 4TB EHD by running Windows Explorer and selecting Computer in the left-hand pane. All the PC’s drives will be shown in the right-hand pane. If he right-clicks on the 4TB drive and selects Properties from the drop-down menu, the Properties sheet will have an entry for “File System” that will usually be NTFS or FAT32. Either should be fine. However, if both of you want to read and write to this particular EHD, I suggest reformatting it in exFAT while it’s still empty. You should then be able to copy files to it with your Mac. If your Mac still refuses to recognise it, you can tell it to initialise the drive as an MS-DOS disk (ie FAT32). Meanwhile, your external hard drive is probably formatted in a version of Apple’s Hierarchical File System (HFS). Windows PCs won’t normally read that without an additional software driver, such as Erik Larsson’s HFSExplorer or the DiskInternals Linux Reader. (It’s a Windows program that reads Linux and Mac disks.) Both are free. So, you could use your Mac to copy the files to your dad’s 4TB FAT32/exFAT drive, or your dad could install a free HFS+ driver and use his PC to read them from your Mac drive. I don’t know which would be simpler, but if the first one doesn’t work, you can try the second. Finally, although an external hard drive is a good way to move files from a Mac to a PC, there are other ways to do it. The most obvious solution is to use a USB Flash drive. This can get tedious, depending on how much data you need to move. However, SanDisk sells thumb drives with capacities up to 128GB, so it’s just a case of deciding how big a drive you need. Some of the Amazon reviews complain that the transfer speed of the 128GB version is very slow, but trying to do it via a cloud storage system would be even slower. A less obvious solution is to use a standard ethernet cable to connect the two machines together, as shown in this YouTube video. This should also work quickly. Playing ALAC files in Windows. I have some Apple Lossless files on my Mac and also want to play them on my Windows PC. Is there a simple way to do this? The problem with ALAC is that it’s not widely supported outside the Apple world, where FLAC is the de facto lossless standard. The answer depends on whether you want to convert your ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) music files to another format that’s more popular on Windows, and if so, which. The options include FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and compressed “lossy” formats such as MP3 or AAC. If you don’t need the full fidelity of lossless playback, then Lame MP3 or AAC will save a lot of space. Apple lossless files take up about 5MB per minute whereas MP3 might be 1MB per minute. One lossless format can be converted into another lossless format without any loss of sound quality, so that’s not a problem. However, people often convert lossless files into a compressed format for use on a PC, phone or MP3 player. This does cause some loss in sound quality, though you may not be able to hear the difference. You should be able to play your ALAC files in Windows by using either the VLC media player or foobar2000, but that may not fit well with whatever you use at the moment. However, if you have an iPhone and/or an iPad or iPod, then these support Apple Lossless. Also, you will already be using iTunes for Windows, QuickTime etc. In this scenario, converting your ALAC files to FLAC would be a bad idea, though you should still consider AAC. However, if you use an Android phone or tablet, then it may be worth converting them, as FLAC is now supported as standard on Android. On your PC, you can download a set of open codecs from Xiph.org. The package also includes support for Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Theora, and WebM. These are directshow filters and should work normally with Windows Media Player and hundreds of other standard Windows programs. For people who do want to do file conversions, XLD (X Lossless Decoder) is a good option for Mac users. It’s also much better at ripping audio CDs than iTunes, more like EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for Windows. Windows users who want to convert ALAC files to FLAC and other formats often like dbPowerAmp, but it costs £24 to register after the free trial period. People who can’t or won’t pay can use xrecode, or the foobar2000 media player to do file conversions. Downloading mac files on a pc. How To Download Mac Files On A PC. MacWindows.com - great site for integrating Macs and PeeCees. hfsutils allows PeeCee's to read mac 1.4 meg floppies (NOT 800k) Download apps on a PeeCee and read them on a Mac. How to download mac files on a PeeCee. (PDF) PDF to Word. Yes, on the same wire , Mac's and Pc's can coexist perfectly. As for software , you have the following choices: If you have a Windows NT server machine, install the fileservices for the Mac and no software on your Macs. Windows NT server or Windows 3.11,95 or 98 or LanManager, install Dave on the Mac to connect to the Windows shares. One Windows machine or more: Install PCMacLan to share/access disks with Mac Machines on each Windows Machine. And now my favorites ( free software ): One Windows 3.11 PC or more, download the free version of PCMacLan for Win 3.11 from http://www.miramarsys.com If you have some time and an old PC ( any 486 will do ) install Linux on that PC. Install samba on the linux server. That way it can serve files and printers to Windows machines, with no addicional softare needed on the Pc side. Install netatalk on the linux, it provides appletalk file and print services to the Macs, with no additional software needed on the Mac side. If you share the same directories, and define the extensions/ resource info for the data files you have you can share and move the files from any platform at will. Define the printers so that on the Mac you can print to a virtual Laser with Postscript, that really is one cheap Laser or InkJet without Postscript. On the Linux you have Ghostscript , that makes the translation for you, every time you print. Just print to Laserwriter 8 and the files come out on a cheap Laserjet or DeskJet. Downloading Mac software on a PC. RAWRITE - actually part of Slackware Linux, but it can be used here too. It's free and a very small download (about 36K). (If RAWRITE won't work or gives you problems, try WinImage .) System 6.0.8 bootdisk image (900K). If your Mac needs System 7 or higher, get the 7.5 Network Access Disk and use that to put a very basic OS on the Mac. Once you have everything, install Stuffit Expander, unstuff the disk image to a new folder on your hard disk, and name the folder something short, like "Mac." Copy the RAWRITE program into this same folder. Rename the image file to image.img. Start your MS-DOS Prompt and type the following: Type c: (or whatever your drive letter with the Mac OS image file is) Press Return or Enter. Type cd\path\to\where\you\unstuffed Press Return or Enter. You should see a prompt something like this c:\mac>. Type rawrite This will execute the RAWRITE program. You should see this: RaWrite 1.3 - Write disk file to raw floppy diskette. Enter source file name: Type image.img Press Return or Enter. It will then ask which drive you wish to write. Insert a blank floppy in your floppy disk drive. Type a: (If your floppy is a different letter, substitute that letter.) Press Return or Enter. Press Return or Enter again. The disk should now be written. This may take some time. It can be quite noisy on some floppy drives but this is normal. If all goes well, rawrite will finish and return you to the DOS prompt. Close the DOS window. Remove the floppy disk from the drive. Place the new bootdisk in your Mac's floppy drive and power it up. The Mac should boot from the floppy. Use the Apple HD SC utility on the boot disk to re-initialise your hard disk, if present. When the formatting program completes, quit it and drag the contents of the floppy onto the hard disk. Open the System Folder on the HDD and then close it again to "bless" it. Go to: Special -> Restart The boot disk should eject and the machine should restart from the HDD. Just a quick note, I don't know how many people are aware of the fact that you can make Mac system disks using a PC. Download the program 'Winimage' from Tucows or wherever and then use it to write the floppy images of 6.0.8 or 7.X available from Apple. I've tried it with 6.0.8 and it finally let me boot my portable, and the system 7.5 also seems to work fine. Almost makes up for the iMac not having a floppy drive. Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 20:55:34 +0000. From: Jay Wiese
Downloading Mac Files on a Pc How to Open and Run EXE File on Mac
