Parallels 3.0 v Boot Camp

i am about to purchase my first mac

i dont plan on doing too much gaming with it, as i will be in med school. seems like what ive read, is that parallels for basic needs, and boot camp for gaming.

however those were older reviews (from summer 06), so i was wondering if it still the same.

also i know boot camp comes with leopard, but i would get parallels for ~5 bucks, so its not breakin the bank.

Boot Camp allows you to completely boot into Windows when you're booting the machine. It's as if you're sitting at a Windows machine. Don't forget that you still need a valid Windows license to use Boot Camp. Parallels allows you to natively run some Windows applications in your Mac OS. For your needs, it sounds like Parallels should work fine for you. As long as you don't have many programs that need Windows, it should be fine.

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CArmstrong said:

Boot Camp allows you to completely boot into Windows when you're booting the machine. It's as if you're sitting at a Windows machine. Don't forget that you still need a valid Windows license to use Boot Camp. Parallels allows you to natively run some Windows applications in your Mac OS. For your needs, it sounds like Parallels should work fine for you. As long as you don't have many programs that need Windows, it should be fine.

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That's not quite true. You've said that as though Parallels doesn't give you a full Windows environment, but it does.

If you configure Parallels to load full screen, optimise memory for the guest OS (rather than OS X), then it will behave like native Windows, and run around 90% of the speed of bootcamp. The payback is that with the flick of a key, you're back in OS X - you can even run your OS X apps in Windows, or vice versa, and drag files from one desktop to another (which is funky).

The only thing is seriously lacks is DX9.x compatibility. DX8.1 (graphics) offers mixed performance, depending on your machine.

To the OP - Parallels should suite your needs, but you should probably install Windows in Boot Camp 1st, use that install to run Parallels and see which suits best. Don't activate WinXP until you decide which to use, because it will treat each install as essentially a different computer, and MS won't allow both to be activated so close together.