Bootcamp or Parallel for Graphic design?

Hi,

I've recently purchased a MacBook Pro 15in, 4 GB RAM.

I plan to do 2D graphic design (Photoshop, Illustrator), using OSX, and 3D design (3ds max) with Windows 7.

Now, my question is: Should I consider using bootcamp or Parallel?

My concern is that with parallel Desktop, my 4GB of RAM would be split between the 2 OS, decreasing my softwares' performances a lot.

I am still pretty new to the Mac environment, so I would appreciate a lot if someone could shed light on this.

Thanks!

The advantages of Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox is that you can access your Mac programs at the same time as the Windows applications inside the VM. But as you noted, you'll be limiting your memory to both Windows and Mac since they'll be shared..

Depending on how intensive you get you might be able to live with the limitations, but if that doesn't pan out, you'll have to boot camp and dual-boot OS X and Windows. The downsides of this are pretty clear, in that, you will need to reboot to go from one OS to the other..

You can always grab the free VirtualBox and if you already have a copy of Windows and the 3DS Max, try it out right now to see how everything works in the VM..

Regards

Thanks for the quick reply.

Do you think I could setup Bootcamp first, and the, when I'm ready to
upgrade to 8GB RAM, I install Parallel Desktop instead? Is that feasible without
formatting the drive?

If you already have a copy of Windows you can use then absolutely go ahead and play with bootcamp. You can then migrate that boot camp partition to a parallels VM if you choose to later on..

Regards

Yes, Bootcamp for sure. Parallels is painfully slow unless you have some serious hardware. It's mildly frustrating having to boot Windows on the occasions where you need to use it with Bootcamp but... I don't use it very often so it's not the end of the world.

kainfury said:

Hi,

I've recently purchased a MacBook Pro 15in, 4 GB RAM.

I plan to do 2D graphic design (Photoshop, Illustrator), using OSX, and 3D design (3ds max) with Windows 7.

Now, my question is: Should I consider using bootcamp or Parallel?

My concern is that with parallel Desktop, my 4GB of RAM would be split between the 2 OS, decreasing my softwares' performances a lot.

I am still pretty new to the Mac environment, so I would appreciate a lot if someone could shed light on this.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

RAM is cheap these days. I would up your RAM to 8GB and go with Parallels or Fusion (I have used both and personally prefer Fusion). This way you can get the best of both worlds without having to boot back and forth, plus you can drag files back and forth at will between OSes at will, it makes things really seamless.

My 2 cents.