Parallels & Bootcamp Performance

I'm curious, what would happen if I had a partition created in Boot Camp for Windows XP and I used Parallels to launch that partition? It would use the special drivers that Parallels has on the Windows XP guest, right? Is the performance of doing it this way better than if I had the Windows XP hard drive file on the OSX partition?

 

Many people do this! The performance difference isn't noticeable. It also saves a bunch of hard drive space when you utilize your bootcamp partition in Parallels or VMware Fusion instead of making a separate virtual machine.

Just use your bootcamp windows for parallels! Don't create a separate one!

 

awesome. can't wait to get my hands on it. first thing i'll do is figure out how much space i should give to windows on the HD. i'm still debating that. most likely i'll give it the majority of the space available, seeing as i'm more of a windows person, but i do want to use osx too.

is it possible to use boot camp to have more than two partitions? i'd like to have a partition for windows xp, and one for vista, and another for osx...

 

Something for you to consider is to actually split your hard drive into three. One for OS X, one for Windows, and one for Data. This way you can share back and forth whatever music/movie/data files you have.

I have my parallels running off of my 32GB windows partition. I tried doing 15GB at first, and found that was to little. Now I'm thinking I should have given it a little less than 32GB, as I find more and more that I really don't need it, and in fact hate rebooting into windows.

I'd recommend using OS X by itself for a week or two so you can decide just how much time you really want to spend in Windows, and don't allot too much space for it.

 

boot camp won't allow you to handle more than two partitions. that doesn't mean you can't use a third party tool to do it, though.

 

If I were to walk into an Apple store to pick up a MacBook Pro, but request that the hard-drive be bigger, will they open one up and install the new one right then and there? Or will they tell me they have to ship one from a warehouse somewhere?

 

No hard drive upgrades in-store. At least that's what I was told by Apple when I purchased a MBP. It doesn't hurt to ask again, but I think you'll have to order online for that option. They will however upgrade RAM in-store.