Bootcamp versus Parallels.

Hi guys,
it's been long time since I was around here, so hello again.

Just a quick question.
I have just installed parallels on my new Mac Book Pro, and then installed windows XP, but have since seen that I already have bootcamp on my new mac, courtesy of Leopard.

Can anyone tell me which is a better proposition.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but parallels just runs XP as if it was another application, so to speak, alongside OS X, whereas Bootcamp actually allows me to boot the mac almost as if it was a PC.

Is that right?

Thanks in advance for any help.


Simeon.

You are correct

Hi Simeon,

I'm not a Mac user yet but I've virtualized XP in Linux many times. With boot camp you're running XP on the full power of you MBP's hardware. With Parallels your running it like you said as an application.

If you have a decent amount of RAM in your MBP, running XP in Parallels is fine for general stuff like word processing even photoshop so long as you give the virtual machine enough RAM. If you want to game, I would definitely go with boot camp so you get the full hardware power.

The nice thing about Parallels from what I read is it will allow you to use your bootcamp partition as a virtual machine from within Leopard so you have the best of both worlds.

Thanks guys!
Big Dan, if I understand correctly, I should keep parallels, but also install bootcamp, so then I can access XP from within the partition?
I'm not sure how I would go about that, but i guess I'll give it a shot.

If I wanted to play PC games through bootcamp would I essentially get a PC experience, and be able to play recent games? Will my MBP be powerful enough?

Also, when I'm partitioning my harddrive for XP, do i need to make space for any software/games I'm going to be installing?
Is it essentially like a mini PC on my Mac?
Would about 10 GB's be enough?
I'm not going to be using it much, just for the odd game and what not.



Cheers.

I'd say give it at least 20 GBs of HD space just to be safe; once you partition I don't believe you can resize. Yes you need to give it enough space for XP and all the programs and stuff you will be piling on. I would also consider formatting your XP partition as FAT32 so you can read/write from it from within Leopard. If you format the drive as the windows standard, NTFS, you can only read from the drive from within Leopard. FAT32 supports up to a 32GB partition so you should be fine there size wise. Don't forget when in bootcamp you can always use an External drive just like if you were on Windows.

I did read on the parallels site that you can your BootCamp partition as a virtual machine. This way you get the best of both worlds you can run small programs in the VM if you need the full power of your computer for games and what have you just reboot into the Bootcamp partition.

Even though I was strongly considering Fusion, I may go with Parallels as it seems to have the best feature set out there.