Guide for Choosing Boot Camp or Parallels to Run Windows on an Apple MacBook Discussion

This article is an overview and comparison of two alternatives for running Windows on an Intel based Apple MacBook: Parallels or Boot Camp, which to choose? Pictures, benchmarks and video are included to demonstrate each Windows on a Mac solution.

Read the full content of this Article: Guide for Choosing Boot Camp or Parallels to Run Windows on an Apple MacBook

 

Great review, Dazzla! It came right about time, hehe.

Regardless of the difference in terms of gaming performance, i think they both are quite good already. Another important thing to consider is the stability. Running two operating systems at the same time is of course the most convenient way for most ppl. But it has been conceivable for me to think that one OS running within another thru a virtual machine may give you more problems than just running one natively, and i also assumed that Apple's driver support for XP should be better than Parallels'. Therefore i decided to use boot camp. However, having it on my Macbook for only a week, i've got the "kernel error" blue screen and had to shut down XP 5 times already. Did you see any similar issues with Parallels?

 

Surely half life was being played on a macbook pro, not a macbook?!

 

Nope, it was on my Macbook with 2GB RAM. The frame rate is pretty surprising but note that there's mot many enemies on the screen. It's definitely playable though!

 

That's one heck of a review. Hat's off to you!

 

heck of a report there!! I've needed something concise like that to explain the installation proceedure for both, as well as a summation of the various pros n' cons...commendable job! much appreciated...

 

I can't believe how well it handles HL2? that is pretty amazing.

 

So was HL2 running very smooth? In terms of qucik movement and fast response, how was it at 1280x800? The video was kind of blurry, so it's a bit hard to tell.

 

GREAT REVIEW!! thanks!!

 

Note, to setup Boot Camp you need to have a single Mac OS X partition formatted as Extended (Journaled) volume. If you have multiple partitions then you must restore the hard drive to a single partition before starting.

In the process of starting the download of bootcamp, I noticed that I might have started with more than a single partition. So now I'm trying to backtrack and do this right.

Question one: how can I find out how many partitions I have on my macbook pro.
Question two: how can I then backtrack my bootcamp installation process and do this right?

Thanks!!!

 

Turning the clock back to that time, that is not very accurate. In fact, there was a solution by Jesus Lopez Amaro (aka Blanka) and Eric Wasserman (aka narf2006) who won the competition.

You can check the solution on the official website for the contest:
winxponmac

 

Do not be fooled by the professional reviewers. Parallels 3 is a disaster for the average user. While they've got a lot right, the glitches are killers. My experience has been to put dozens of hours into attempting to get it to work correctly and finally having to abandon it due to regular crashes, difficulties using standard peripherals, and networking problems.

The promise of Parallels is compelling -- to be able to run Mac and Windows programs seamlessly on a Mac. It was this assurance, backed by positive magazine reviews, that I made the ultimately disastrous mistake when my wife and I recently needed new laptops of switching from PC to Mac.

For starters, Parallels is hardly easy or intuitive to set up. Phone tech support is $30 a pop (or by e-mail, where the answers are pat and do not adequately address your specific situation, and the lag time has averaged more than a week, not the promised 3 days, totally hanging me up several times). I am a relatively sophisticated user, but after exhausting every resource available to me (including paid tech support) and squandering many dozens of hours, the program still crashes my MacBook Pro or my wife's Airbook or turns the screen to gibberish (the only way out is to reboot, often losing the most recent data). We cannot get peripherals such as printers or external drives or external monitors to run reliably on both the Mac and Windows sides; same with networking, rendering the program worse than useless.

I sent an earlier draft of this review to Mr. John Rhoades, Director of Operations. He informed me that "threatening Parallels with 'bad mouthing' and poor reviews is a poor way to get our attention." Fair enough. However, as I responded to him, I was not writing in the spirit of threatening, but simply "trying to determine if the program can run standard Windows programs and peripherals without undue problems, and if it can't (even though the company leads the customer to believe that it can), to responsibly warn fellow users to not expect that it can."

I offered to have their tech support team show me how to work out the problems, demonstrating that the program works as advertised. They did not respond again, which I assume means that they were not confident that they could work out the problems since the mention of a negative review did get their attention. My uses are fairly standard. No 3-D games, no video editing; just Office for Windows (I like it a lot more than Office for Mac), a windows e-mail program that has no equivalent in Mac, web surfing, and a few add-ons like a good thesaurus.

The current version is 3.0. My advice: wait for Ver 5, and only if they institute free tech support for the first month while you are setting it all up. Meanwhile, I am resorting to Boot Camp and the inconvenience of reboots to move between OS X to XP. Unexpected crashes and the inability to use peripherals are far more inconvenient.