Should I install Parallels or Boot Camp
Sorry for starting a new topic. I figured it would be quicker to answer my questions by doing so.
I will have a new iMac delivered tomorrow at my front door (1.83 GHz model with stock hard drive and 128 MB video card).
I have read posts on this forum, Apple.com, Parallels.com and many other Mac sites regarding the recent releases of Parallels Workstation and Apple Boot Camp. I have also read some horror stories involving each (e.g., Mac OS boot disk becomes unusable). It seems that the MacBook Pro seem to be more problematic than either the Mac Mini's or iMac's. Is this a correct assessment?
Can anyone recommend one over the other? I am interested in running XP Pro with Visual Studio 2005, MS Office 2003 Pro and some PC games that up until now I have not been able to (i.e, CSI game, City of Villians, Star Wars Galaxy at War, etc.).
I am leaning towards boot camp since it is an Apple product and will be part of Leopard.
Thoughts.
Thanks in advance.
Dave
I will have a new iMac delivered tomorrow at my front door (1.83 GHz model with stock hard drive and 128 MB video card).
I have read posts on this forum, Apple.com, Parallels.com and many other Mac sites regarding the recent releases of Parallels Workstation and Apple Boot Camp. I have also read some horror stories involving each (e.g., Mac OS boot disk becomes unusable). It seems that the MacBook Pro seem to be more problematic than either the Mac Mini's or iMac's. Is this a correct assessment?
Can anyone recommend one over the other? I am interested in running XP Pro with Visual Studio 2005, MS Office 2003 Pro and some PC games that up until now I have not been able to (i.e, CSI game, City of Villians, Star Wars Galaxy at War, etc.).
I am leaning towards boot camp since it is an Apple product and will be part of Leopard.
Thoughts.
Thanks in advance.
Dave
Comments
Originally posted by Dave K.
Parallels Workstation --> (i.e, CSI game, City of Villians, Star Wars Galaxy at War, etc.).
No sound or 3D acceleration in Parallels WS (which is now up to beta3)
put one on an external, one internal...i'm guessing bootcamp doesn't work external?
Boot Camp, on the other hand, requires you to reboot your machine. So, you are either running Mac OS X -- or -- XP, but not both at the same time. Thus, you loose all your access to your Mac programs and data. But for gaming, this is the only way to get full 3D accelleration.
So personally, if I did gaming, I would use both. In my circumstance, I needed Microsoft Access and a few specialize flight planning software not available on the Mac. In my case, PW was the perfect solution. I can keep XP off the internet as much as possible by using Safari and Mail. I still have easy access to my Address Book. I use MS Office 2004 for the Mac (I much perfer the interface to the crummy Window's interface). I've done this for years and have seemlessly exchanged files with clients using PC's.
Originally posted by Dave K.
Sorry for starting a new topic. I figured it would be quicker to answer my questions by doing so.
I will have a new iMac delivered tomorrow at my front door (1.83 GHz model with stock hard drive and 128 MB video card).
I have read posts on this forum, Apple.com, Parallels.com and many other Mac sites regarding the recent releases of Parallels Workstation and Apple Boot Camp. I have also read some horror stories involving each (e.g., Mac OS boot disk becomes unusable). It seems that the MacBook Pro seem to be more problematic than either the Mac Mini's or iMac's. Is this a correct assessment?
Can anyone recommend one over the other? I am interested in running XP Pro with Visual Studio 2005, MS Office 2003 Pro and some PC games that up until now I have not been able to (i.e, CSI game, City of Villians, Star Wars Galaxy at War, etc.).
I am leaning towards boot camp since it is an Apple product and will be part of Leopard.
Thoughts.
Thanks in advance.
Dave
Please be careful and remember both apps are beta. They both need time to mature. If you must experiment use another user account as an alias so not to lose your mission critical data.
Best regards
Benton
Originally posted by cj171
I think i'll do both when I get my iMac
put one on an external, one internal...i'm guessing bootcamp doesn't work external?
This is a good question... Does Boot camp work with an external hdd? If so, you could keep your original hdd in the iMac or whatever with just OS X, and then carry Windows around with you, plug it in when need be. Does anyone know if this will work?
Windows runs fantastic. It is by far the fastest version of Windows I have ever used. I don't know if it just due to the dual core chips or Apple hardware or both, but it is fast. I have a 1 GB memory stick coming next week which should make things even faster. I can't wait.
I will wait for more a feature rich Parallels or to see what VM Ware is up to.
Thanks to all of the those who replied.
Dave
it certainly will be interesting to see who comes out on top of the possible VM wars in the next year or so...Parallels has the early lead but the vets at VirtualPC or VMWare may find a more effective solution...although CPU-wise, it seems it will be hard to beat Parallels(Anandtech found in some tests, parallels scored higher than bootcamp)
Originally posted by cj171
Anandtech found in some tests, parallels scored higher than bootcamp
How can that be possible?
But that's somewhat speculative of me.
Originally posted by cj171
and logistically, it makes sense for doing work because who wants to sit there while their macbook reboots every time they want to use an app in the other OS
True, but one resource that the OS can't just hand over to the VM is the display - every other resource comes back to Mach when it is finished, so Mach doesn't get hijacked, except for the video. Depending on how "low-overhead" the handling of display requests from the VM is, certain users might not be happy with Windows in a VM.
Please explain what your last comment means...
Originally posted by builttospill
Lundy,
Please explain what your last comment means...
Well, let's look at what it takes to make a Virtual Machine.
For the moment, we will put aside the issue of emulating a different chip. Let's assume we emulate the same chip.
Now a VM is an illusion set up by the OS that is "in charge", so that apps running on the VM believe that they are running on an actual hardware machine.
So if an app (say Windows XP) wants to access the disk, then the VM intercepts the call and passes it to the OS in charge, and then goes on to do something else until the OS says that the disk is finished doing the read or write. The same holds for the processor.
But when it comes to serial devices like printers, tape drives, and the display, you can't just hand over the device to the VM requesting it. Access to these devices has to undergo more virtualization by the OS. The same thing was true of VM in 1969 - the IBM 360 could emulate itself, making dozens of virtual machines. Each user thought they had a hardware card punch, for example. But you could not just hand over the real card punch to a program, because cards from other programs were being punched also. For disk access it was not a problem, nor for the processor - these did not require the OS to do much other than pass the request through to the resource - the CPU would interrupt the OS when the timeslice was up, and the disk would also, returning control to the OS.
But you can't just let Windows think that it has a whole hardware display to control, because it doesn't. Windows knows nothing about OS X needing to use the display, so display requests have to be passed through the OS to determine what portion of the screen should be displayed. This MAY or MAY NOT be a serious slowdown, depending on how much "massaging" of the display information is required, and whether or not the video card can handle the "massaging". But it is a concern, and applications which are heavily dependent on fast GPUs may need to be tested first when they are going to be run on a VM. The GPU isn't "emulated", but it can't just be taken over by the guest OS either.
Originally posted by builttospill
parallels released beta 4 yesterday. anybody check it out?
Beta 4 is the first version I installed [2.0 MBP/7200/1 gig] and it runs better than I thought it would. Firefox is super fast, WMVs run great, the mouse feels right, and the CAD programs I use for CNC all work as they should.
It's not as refined as the Classic Environment, but its great as a stop gap until Apple morphs BootCamp into a Classic like VM machine.
Originally posted by LGnome
Beta 4 is the first version I installed [2.0 MBP/7200/1 gig] and it runs better than I thought it would. Firefox is super fast, WMVs run great, the mouse feels right, and the CAD programs I use for CNC all work as they should.
It's not as refined as the Classic Environment, but its great as a stop gap until Apple morphs BooCamp in a Classic like VM machine.
That's pretty good news, thanks!