Is Windows upgrade supported by BootCamp

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Hi everyone,

Since yesterday, I am a happy MacBook Pro owner, trying to find my way around MacOS, by which I have to say I am really impressed :) . I have a couple of questions though, and I was wondering if you could help me address them.

I am thinking of installing Windows through Bootcamp, so that I can make my transition to MacOS easier, and be able to use some s/w that I couldn't easily find on Mac. The question is though: Windows XP or Windows Vista? I would ideally like to use my bootcamp windows installation through vmware fusion or parallels. Both though provide experimental support for windows vista. Thus, I was thinking of installing XP and later, when most of the bugs of VMware have been resolved, to upgrade my installation, via bootcamp, to vista. Do you know if something like that is possible? I'm asking, because I've read that bootcamp requires a non-upgrade windows CD. In my case though, I would preform the upgrade process after I have booted my machine in windows.

Also, given the recent release of VMWare Fusion 1 RC, which of the two major virtualization environments would you recomment (Fusion or Parallels)?

Thank you in advance,

-- ernani
 

cwa107


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Hi everyone,

Since yesterday, I am a happy MacBook Pro owner, trying to find my way around MacOS, by which I have to say I am really impressed :) . I have a couple of questions though, and I was wondering if you could help me address them.

I am thinking of installing Windows through Bootcamp, so that I can make my transition to MacOS easier, and be able to use some s/w that I couldn't easily find on Mac. The question is though: Windows XP or Windows Vista? I would ideally like to use my bootcamp windows installation through vmware fusion or parallels. Both though provide experimental support for windows vista. Thus, I was thinking of installing XP and later, when most of the bugs of VMware have been resolved, to upgrade my installation, via bootcamp, to vista. Do you know if something like that is possible? I'm asking, because I've read that bootcamp requires a non-upgrade windows CD. In my case though, I would preform the upgrade process after I have booted my machine in windows.

Also, given the recent release of VMWare Fusion 1 RC, which of the two major virtualization environments would you recomment (Fusion or Parallels)?

Thank you in advance,

-- ernani

You should be able to do an in-place upgrade on either Boot Camp or Parallels/VMWare. It's the initial install of Windows that requires a true, non-upgrade edition.

Personally, I'd stick to XP. There's nothing (aside from DX10 games) that XP won't run and chances are you don't have a DX10 compatible video card anyway. There's still a lot of bugs to sort out with Vista, I would wait until the first service pack.

As far as virtualization goes, I'd say your best bet is Parallels. They have been rapidly developing and improving their product, much more so than VMware. It's also more mature since it's been in full production for some time. I don't believe VMWare has any features that Parallels doesn't at this point.
 
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Thanks cwa107,

The only reason I'm considering Vista is that at some point, that is after vista mature enough for one to be able to call them an Operating System :) , MS will probably stop supporting Windows XP. And thus, I would hate deleting my Bootcamp partition and reinstall everything from scratch. But since I can upgrade at some point, gives me an incentive to invest in installing xp for the time being.

So you're in favor of Parallels... I have been a user of VMWare software for many years and I have learned to trust their products, but it is true that they are a new "player" in the field of virtualization for mac... So, if I create a Bootcamp virtual machine with Parallels, and at some point I decide to switch to VMWare, can I create a new virtual machine, again from my Bootcamp partition and have access to all the information (files, S/W installations) I created from my parallels virtual machine? I would expect that a virtual machine created from a Bootcamp partition has full read/write acces to it, right?

-- ernani
 

cwa107


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Thanks cwa107,

The only reason I'm considering Vista is that at some point, that is after vista mature enough for one to be able to call them an Operating System :) , MS will probably stop supporting Windows XP. And thus, I would hate deleting my Bootcamp partition and reinstall everything from scratch. But since I can upgrade at some point, gives me an incentive to invest in installing xp for the time being.

So you're in favor of Parallels... I have been a user of VMWare software for many years and I have learned to trust their products, but it is true that they are a new "player" in the field of virtualization for mac... So, if I create a Bootcamp virtual machine with Parallels, and at some point I decide to switch to VMWare, can I create a new virtual machine, again from my Bootcamp partition and have access to all the information (files, S/W installations) I created from my parallels virtual machine? I would expect that a virtual machine created from a Bootcamp partition has full read/write acces to it, right?

-- ernani

I too tried Fusion first. Then, I decided that I didn't want to wait for the beta to time out and would rather have a full product. Parallels looks and runs the same way that Fusion does, it's just more refined (that will of course change once Fusion is released).

Boot Camp allows you to install Windows in a separate partition so that you can choose to either boot into Windows or Mac OS at startup. It is not necessary to install Boot Camp to run Fusion or Parallels. In fact, both products are a lot more functional if you don't use them with a Boot Camp partition. For one thing, you can put the VM in standby mode and close it out if you need to, then later, you can immediately open it right back to where you were without having to put Windows in hibernation. In addition, you can also dynamically resize the Windows partition (it's actually a virtual hard drive file) if you need more space. With Boot Camp, the partition size is fixed.

Nevertheless, in their most recent incarnations, both Parallels and Fusion can use an existing Boot Camp partition. This means that you must first setup Boot Camp and install Windows. Then later, you can have Parallels detect the presence of a Boot Camp partition.
 

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