More on Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation

(Imported from rocketcat-v2)

I've had a bit more time playing with Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation, and they are two, very good, solutions, each to suit a different purpose.

Parallels is for the kind of environment where you have that one critical Windows app that you just have to be able to run, and everything else you do can easily be done on a Mac. The Mac version of Parallels is on special at the moment, as it's still in beta, so can be pre-ordered for $USD39.99 (normally $USD49.99) and then you need to supply your own copy of Windows with it. Parallels will run pretty much any x86 operating system, from DOS and Windows 3.1 through to Solaris x86 and Windows Server 2003 with a sprinkling of Linux and OS/2 thrown in for good measure. It virtualises the whole PC's hardware, so you see a single CPU, an Intel chipset, SVGA Graphics card with VESA 3.0 support, NIC etc... It seems to perform pretty well, the main downside being the bog-standard graphics chipset with no 3D acceleration. Lack of 3D support, however, is generally not going to be a problem for your business applications. If you want to share files with the Mac side of things, you will need to use personal file sharing, via a network connection (even if it is Mac OS X and Parallels running Windows on the one machine)

At the other end of the spectrum is the Boot Camp solution. It seems that no sooner than someone had won a competition to get Windows booting on Apple hardware, then Apple released their official solution. Installing Windows via Boot Camp is quite straightforward - the installer even offers to (non-destructively) repartition your disk as you have to use a dedicated Windows partition. Running Windows via this method is fast. As fast as a comparable PC. Windows has full access to all the hardware in the machine - your ATI graphics accelerator, the 667MHz RAM, the hard disk, the whole lot. The downside is that you'll need another piece of software, Windows aside, if you want to be able to access your Mac HFS+ partition from Windows called MacDrive, which is also $USD49.99. The upside is that Mac OS X can read NTFS partitions, but not write back to them, so accessing your Windows files from OS X is pretty straightforward.