Compare Boot Camp / Parrallels / Fusion<br><br>Basic differences?<br><br>Are they like Blu Ray / HDDVD?<br><br>Beta / VHS ?<br><br>Do I understand that one you have to 'boot into' and the other<br><br>Runs seamlessly beside OS X all the time?<br><br>From another thread I think I've decided on Win XP but do I need home version, simple, pro ?<br><br>I just want Windows occasionally when something says it won't work on Macintosh or for a prog not available in OS X AND . . . because I like toys <br><br>My daughter knows a guy at Linfield who works on Macs that I'll get to install and maintain it for me.<br><br>The person to whom I hand down this Mac will get a nice bonus feature too. It will be a while. I wonder what features my NEXT Mac will have that this one does not. I don't want a MacAir deally bob! I know -- I want a Macintosh all in one with a personal 24/7 in house trainer !! egads! just when I thought I had just about anything I could ever dream of or want! [drooling now at the thought]<br><br>Edit:<br>Fusion: without rebooting<br>Parrallels: side-by-side?<br>Boot Camp: Okay, I'm learning. Boot Camp assistant is on my Mac, so I already have it?<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by starmillway on 02/25/08 06:01 PM (server time).</EM></FONT></P>

I'd suggest Parallels/VMWare Fusion unless you absolutely NEED boot camp. <br><br>If you aren't going to play 3D games or apps that rely a lot on the GPU of your Mac then Virtualization software is your best bet. It's safer because you don't have to partition your HD and it's much easier to back up. If things go wrong, just throw away the disk image and start with a fresh copy or recent good backup.<br><br>Just make sure you have at least 2GB of RAM ...otherwise it will likely slow your machine down if you keep both active for any length of time. <br><br>zweisoft<br>

10 or more years ago, I had a virtual windows prog [the one Microsoft now owns, I think] on my 7100av Mac. It was danged slow, fer sure! I was using Microsoft Word, Excel, a slide show program I can't remember the name of and PageMaker.<br><br>I have 4 MB RAM on this iMac. Will it be more responsive than 10 years ago? <br><br><br><br><br>

I was looking at the same question over the weekend as to what to do to replace Virtual PC and my Windows 95 (I only need one old program a few times).<br><br>Here is one article I found helpful. The cheapest I was able to find was $185.00<br><br><br><br>_______<br>

Excellent MacTech! Read it, but will read it again. Benchmarking tests are a little confusing for me but at the conclusion:<br><br><blockquote>Boot Camp, VMware Fusion and Parallels are all very good, each in their own way. You should make your decisions based on what your needs are as a result.<br><br>If you don't want Mac integration, and just want to run Windows, go with Boot Camp. It's faster than a PC anyway.<br><br>If you want a virtualization product (that allows you to run Windows alongside Mac OS X), and you want the best performance for the types of things that we tested, then clearly you need to run XP and not Vista. Furthermore, in our tests, both VMware Fusion and Parallels performed well, and were a good user experience. That said, Parallels was somewhat faster in general than VMware Fusion for XP.<br><br>If you want the best virtualization performance for Vista, then VMware Fusion is your choice. And, if you want to keep your Mac OS X and Windows environments completely separate, VMware Fusion's design may be your better choice. (And, although we didn't test it, we would expect VMware Fusion to have better multi-processor support if you really have an application that is designed to take advantage of it.) If your goal is tight integration between one or more Windows applications and Mac OS X, Parallels is the clear winner when running either XP or Vista. And, as we said before, if you want the best XP performance with the types of applications tested here, Parallels is not only faster than VMware Fusion, but it's faster than Boot Camp on average for the applications that we tested.</blockquote><br><br>don't want Mac integration, and just want to run Windows, go with Boot Camp<br>run Windows alongside Mac OS X parallels was somewhat faster in general than VMware Fusion for XP<br>keep your Mac OS X and Windows environments completely separate, VMware Fusion's design may be your better choice<br><br><br>[color:blue]Read it again. I'm thinking Boot Camp for me. A fast PC with Windows when I want it. Not going to integrate much so I'll get Win XP.</font color=blue><br><br>Thanks, Bigger! <br>or<br>Thanks Dr. Foot! ha, ha, ha, . . . . . . .<br><br><br><br>

If you have any friends, relatives, grandkids, etc. who have access to an 'educational discount', get 'Windows XP Pro (SP2). The savings are tremendous!<br>XP Pro (SP2) can be had for under $80.00 in any campus store!<br>And it's the 'full' edition, not some sort of water down 'student/teacher' edition.<br><br>And, go with 'Boot Camp'! <br><br>[color:blue][/b]Hodie mihi. Cras tibi.</font color=blue>[/b]

I ended up getting Parallels and a full version of XP that I can install with bootcamp in case I decide to go that way later. <br><br>It is my understanding that the OEM versions that come packaged with Parallels/VMware can only be installed with the virtual machines and as a stand alone install...maybe mistaken though as my Virtual PC came with a full version of 95.<br><br>_______<br>

I run Windows XP Pro SP2 under Bootcamp. My main complaint is that I use a bluetooth keyboard exclusively and when I'm booting into Windows, I can't type my username/password with the bluetooth keyboard. I have to go looking for a USB keyboard either in my son's room or in the basement family room (where my old iMac is living now), so I don't use it much. It's really a pain that Windows can't boot with a bluetooth keyboard, IMHO. <br><br>My 2 cents...<br><br>

i bought Parallels and use it on my Blackbook 2 GHz Core Duo. i am not pleased with the speed of Windows on this machine, but it certainly puts Virtual PC on the older Macs to shame. it's tolerable, but i have stopped using Parallels for Windows and now just use it for Ubuntu (though, i can't get the latest version installed yet).<br><br>

Have you tried changing the performance preferences for your virtual machine with the Configuration Editor in Parallels? If it's set to allow OS X more resources, your Windows environment will be slower than it could be.<br><br>- alec -