Apple Boot Camp vs Parallels?

[indamixx99]

So I just got my new Macbook Pro a week ago and was considering one of these options to run Windows XP on it as well. Does anybody have experience with these and know how well they run? Also, are there any other alternatives out there? Thanks for your help! 🙂

 

[tyanni]

Parallels and Boot Camp are a bit different. If you rarely use XP or OSX and don't mind rebooting to launch the OS of your choice, Boot Camp will work fine. If you want to run multiple virtual machines on your desktop, then get parallels.

Also, VMWare Fusion for OSX is in Beta 3 right now, is free, and is supposed to be better than parallels, although I've never used it.

Tim

 

[Kaido]

Boot Camp is for dual-booting, Parallels is for using an OS virtually. I've used both. For me, dual booting is a pain. Parallels is really slick, especially the new update with Coherence which lets you run Windows programs in a window inside of OS X rather than within the OS window. It all depends on what you need though. If you want to play games, you can't do that in Parallels since the emulated graphics card was only 8mb last time I checked. VMWare is supposed to have full DirectX support, but it's not in a final state yet.

What kind of Windows programs (or other OS) do you want to use specifically?

 

[programmer]

Google for info, but I believe the best approach is to set up a Boot Camp partition, then install Parallels and tell it to use the Boot Camp partition. Then you can use both. That's what I plan to do with my MBP next week. I've been using Parallels and its very good, but much of my work is windows-based development, so I'd prefer the Boot Camp approach and use the laptop as a dedicated Windows box on occasion.