Help! Do i need Bootcamp or Parrallels???

Hi guys.

Just bought a new 24 inch Imac, theee most beautiful thing i have ever seen! Only thing is i need to run a few windows applications and i dont know which is best.

I play online poker as a semi living, hopefully by the middle of next year a full time job, and i can run a few sites easy in osx as they have a mac download. My problem is the softest sites (european) only allow windows based machines to run the software. Also the best tracking software (Pokertracker 3) is also windows only.

So i would be running around 4-6 tables and tracking software for each and that is all i would use windows for. Ideally i would love to do this in parallels rather than booting up all the time, and i have had the RAM upgraded to 4GB.

Would you recommend bootcamp or is this something parallels should be able to cope with?

Thanks guys

I use these programs as well. When I am just messing around I use the Mac versions but you definitely need Windows to run the tracking software (unfortunately). I use VMWare Fusion and it works fine. 4 GB of RAM will also help. I recommend downloading the trial versions of both Parallels and Fusion and seeing which you prefer. The poker sites generally don't have complex graphics requiring you to run Windows natively.

Cheers

boot camp and VMware?

What i did was partition my HD with boot camp (if you have a large HD you might want to increase the initial 5 GB partition to atleast 32 GB) load up your copy of windows. I did it in the regular time (not quick) FAT32 setup. Now you can get eaither VMware or parrallels loaded on your mac osx. I know VMware makes it very easy to use your existing partition as your virtual machine. This has proven to me to be valuable because if VMware fails your boot camp partition is not messed up. So in other words use both; boot camp and VMware/parrallels. gl!

Run it in Parallels mode.. I tried to put XP on my wife's computer using Bootcamp but Windows was being retarded. You basically have to partition the drive using Bootcamp and then let Windows repartition it because Windows does not recognize it.