boot camp or parallels

Please can somebody help, I need to put a windows only program on to my mac. (I wish that I didn't!!) Which is the best way to go, bootcamp or parallels. I'm not sure having read the reviews.

Thanks

Whit

I use parallels cos you don't have to restart to boot up windows.

if the program isn't graphic intensive e.g. a game. you should be fine.

Depends on the App you need to run, the virtual machine (Paralllels, VirtualBox, VMware) is a good option to quickly startup Windows while in Mac and run the application and return without having to restart..but as @yemilipede suggested, if the application is resource intensive, you might have to boot camp into Windows..

Regards

I have a WinXPx86 install running via Bootcamp. Parallels lets me use it as well. This way I can run it full blown for intense things, or as a VM if I'm just doing my time sheet for work. Some folks claim that it doesn't work well, but I've never had any issues with it (and followed the Parallels installation instructions when setting it up). A nice bonus is conveniently dragging items from the Win SSD partition to my Mac SSD partition for email attachments, etc.

+1 for XJ-Linux's idea if that works..man that's the best of both worlds then..

Regards

I would recommend VMWare Fusion 3.0 over Parallels. Fusion now has full Aero support and is a lot more stable in my experience.

I also use VMFusion and, over the past six months have had no problems with it - you need a vm if you are fairly continuously switching from one os to another, moving between apps you have on the pc and those under os x. I do that all the time. On the other hand, if you don't work in this way and simply want to use pc software occasionally then the cheapest solution is to use Boot Camp. Of course, it's also cheap to use Virtual Box, which is free, but I have no experience of it. As another member said, VMFusion is right up to date with 10.6.1 support.

Fusion also has much stronger Linux support with their Guest OS tools package. The last time I worked with Parallels (3.0?), it was relatively weak and didn't work at all in certain distros.

I use VirtualBox and it works great. I prefer it to vmware for desktop usage (20M compared to 200M) and it's free. It also runs on OS X, Windows and Linux. Parallels is Mac only and costs money. I'd never pay when VB is free and every bit as good. I also think it's more approachable for users new to virtualization. I boot Windows 2008 Server and Kubuntu 9.10 from VirtualBox under OS X 10.6.1. Thanks to the 8 gig of memory in my macbook I can run all three (Windows, Kubuntu and OS X) concurrently without issue. USB can be troublesome for some devices but I have not fully tested the latest release. It just came out a few days ago. It also doesn't support Aero in Windows but most virtual machine vendors are still working on it. The rumor is 3.1 will support Aero.

Thanks for all the help, I will have a look at VB.
The only program that I need is an account package for work so it won't be heavy on resources. The only reason for putting in on the mac is because my laptop has crashed.

Just one more question, if I install VB will be backed up by time machine in the as way as normal?

Thanks

Whit

Sure. VirtualBox installs to Applications and virtual disk and machine files are under ~/Library/VirtualBox. If you decide to give it a go the VB forums are an excellent resource for help.

VirtualBox

You can also choose to exclude any Virtual Machine (or any other object) in Time Machine's preference settings. FWIW - I am using VB 3.0.10 on my OS X 10.6 Mac Mini without a hitch. Currently it has Win7x86, Debian5 and Fedora10 all jammed on it for playing around with. It seems a bit slower to launch/boot a VM than Parallels, but it's free so I don't really mind. I don't plan to pay for virtualization software again (i.e. Parallels 5?).

Thanks

I am in the middle of installing VB, I will see how I go!!