Should I install Parallels or Boot Camp

dave k. · April 12, 2006 7:25PM

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

gsxrboy · April 12, 2006 7:29PM

Quote:

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)

dave k. · April 12, 2006 7:56PM

Thanks for the info.

cj171 · April 12, 2006 8:32PM

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?

pubguy · April 13, 2006 11:19PM

XP Pro, visual studio and office pro run perfectly in Parallels Workstation. The nice thing is you can multitakst and still have all access to you Mac programs and stability while having easy access to the "work" apps. Plus, with the "Suspend" feature of the virtual machine, you can shut it down within seconds and resume just as fast to pick up right where you left off.

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.

benton · April 13, 2006 11:43PM

Quote:

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

nar1117 · April 15, 2006 1:23PM

Quote:

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?

xool · April 15, 2006 1:59PM

Both?

dave k. · April 15, 2006 2:27PM

I got my iMac and I installed boot that same night. Right after I updated all the included Apple applications (my iMac can with OS 10.4.4), I installed the boot-camp beta. I partitioned a 30 GB drive and installed Windows.

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

cj171 · April 16, 2006 12:16AM

glad to hear you're enjoying it

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)

dave k. · April 16, 2006 5:48AM

Quote:

Originally posted by cj171

Anandtech found in some tests, parallels scored higher than bootcamp

How can that be possible?

chucker · April 16, 2006 5:53AM

Presumably, Parallels doesn't provide as many / as full-featured drivers as Boot Camp does. As such, there is less processing work necessary, so the system will be faster, but it won't be able to do as much.

But that's somewhat speculative of me.

builttospill · April 17, 2006 11:13AM

personally, i believe that once parallels releases it's final product, it will be 100x more useful than boot camp. obviously right now, neither of them are perfect for every day use, but I would familiarize yourself w/ parallels, because running virtual machines is a lot faster than dual booting.

cj171 · April 17, 2006 4:02PM

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

lundy · April 17, 2006 5:28PM

Quote:

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.

builttospill · April 18, 2006 8:15AM

Lundy,

Please explain what your last comment means...

lundy · April 18, 2006 3:06PM

Quote:

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.

cj171 · April 18, 2006 7:03PM

I wonder if it will be possible to hand a gpu over to an emulator if you have, say, a dual SLI system. There are even laptops coming out with dual SLI graphics built in...if you could keep one for the host OS and give the other to the guest, that's the only feasible way I can see a VM getting good graphic performance (with current technology that is)

builttospill · April 19, 2006 9:07AM

parallels released beta 4 yesterday. anybody check it out?

lgnome · April 26, 2006 9:36PM

Quote:

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.

ireland · April 26, 2006 9:45PM

Quote:

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!

Should I install Parallels or Boot Camp

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