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Choosing Parallels Over BootCamp for OS X
juusan writes "Sysadmin Jeremy Randall outlines his installation and impressions of Parallels for Mac OS X. Is it better than BootCamp? Does it run succesfully on a Mac Mini? Does it pass the scrutiny of a fairly picky system administrator? Yes indeed, on all counts."
And really, not much more to read in the article. If he actually were a picky sysadmin, he'd have looked at such points as "can the VM access the host drive, and how can I stop that". If he had a more than cursory interest in it, he would've looked at DirectX support. He couldn't even be bothered to figure out if his Mac supports certain features.
(Don't get me wrong - that's an indicator that Parallels is fairly good. He doesn't even have to care if some things work or not. But that's certainly not "in-depth")
Everything TFA has to say.
1. It works pretty good for a version-1 app.
2. It doesn't work well with external USB drives.
3. You get the occasional "beach ball" if you are running other apps on the OS X desktop and have only 1 GB of RAM.
4. The author is "platform agnostic" and really, really wants you to know that.
5. Rumors are flying that Apple might buy them and incorporate this into 10.5, but then again, maybe not.
Everybody who read my summary instead of clicking the link just saved 5 minutes. If a few million of you did so, I just saved a whole bunch of of entire lives!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Seriously- XP, sitting doing nothing, nothing open- uses 20% of my Macbook's CPU.
Welcome to the Windows world. XP, sitting doing nothing, on a native PC install, uses between 4% and 11% of the CPU on an Athlon 64 3000.
it's under 5%...and QEMU is emulating
QEMU (and most any emulator) actually optimizes out XP's OCD-like behavior, resulting in lower idle CPU use than the real thing. Add a moderate load, though, and watch the difference reverse itself drastically. Virtualization should see that 20% vanish into the actual load, while an emulator will grind to a crawl under load.
Does it run succesfully on a Mac Mini?
Why is this even a real question? The Mac Mini is nothing but an Intel Yonah (Core Solo / Duo) CPU system with an Intel 945 Express chipset (and integrated Intel GMA950 GPU), and EFI instead of a BIOS. Hardware wise, it's an exceptionally common Intel system.
They are meant for different markets.
Parallels is for people who need to run OS X and Windows at the same time.
Boot Camp is for people who need to occassionally run Windows separately from Mac OS X. For example: games, secure environments, people who just want to use Apple hardware with Windows, and have nothing to do with OS X whatsoever.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It's interesting how Windows on Slashdot always tends to be 10 times worse than when I ever use it.
Well, as the most obvious question - Do you get your numbers from Windows Task Manager, or from something a bit more accurate such as Sysinternals' Process Explorer? I used the latter, with an update speed of 5s (for both the longer sampling window and to reduce its own CPU use). And I find that it does indeed disagree with Task manager. I'll trust procexp over taskman any day, though.
Now you've got me curious, though - I tend to tighten XP to an extreme so probably don't make the best example (though ironically, I manke a good example in Microsoft's favor) Tomorrow I'll try a clean install on a machine at work and see how bad it looks with things like themes, indexing, and system restore left on. I'll give MS a break and not install SQL personal/desktop edition, however (with which Vista will ship enabled, sucking an ungodly amount of CPU and memory).
TFA says NOTHING about Parallels being better than Boot Camp; the only reason he cites for wanting to use Parallels instead is to save room on the main disk. Since Parallels fails entirely on his external drive, it doesn't even accomplish that modest goal.
Aside from some fairly vague comments about the VMs being "fairly snappy," there's no indication of performance. From what I've heard, Parallels doesn't even come close to Boot Camp on that front, probably because Apple ported its own drivers specifically for Boot Camp so that all the hardware would work at full speed.
Also, Parallels costs $49.99. Boot Camp is free.
Oh, and the author says that setting up the VMs is time-consuming and complex; Boot Camp, by most reports, is easier to set up than installing Windows on a 'regular' PC.
The only advantage Parallels has over Boot Camp is that it can be used for more than just Windows. However, that's not a reason to prefer it if what you want is Windows. Boot Camp is free, faster and easier to set up. There may be some other advantages to Parallels, but this (decidedly mediocre) article doesn't mention any of them.
I'm running Parallels on the exact same setup, and all that stuff runs fine. I do plan to upgrade to 2GB of RAM on the MacBook Pro, though. I will start to have slowdown issues if I have, say, iTunes & Safari running on OSX and then run something memory intensive on the Win2K VM, which is set to use 512MB of RAM. You may not be quite as fast as running it on your Dell, but any slowdown shouldn't be noticeable. At any rate, Parallels has a free trial code, so you can give it a shot without any cost but your time.
Using Parallels is an easy way of installing Linux or Windows. In terms of raw CPU, it works efficiently, with little overhead. However, OSX has a hell of a time with paging and big processes, so get a lot of memory and still be prepared to watch the spinning cursor for a while while switching to/from Parallels.
History.
You probably got pwned by a weak Administrator password.
I'm really getting tired of reading all these comments to the effect that "Bootcamp sucks, it won't run games, it isn't designed for a gamer crowd, etc."
I have no idea if it was built for gamers or not. All I know is that I own a Macbook Pro, have bootcamp installed on it, and find that it works absolutly fine for gaming.
Does it run every last game at tip-top resolutions and graphics levels? No, it's a laptop with an X1600 mobile card in it. It runs newer games (Oblivion is a prime example) WELL, even with all of the default drivers and such that Apple gives you with the bootcamp disk, but it isn't a desktop uber-rig, and never will be.
The ONLY real difference that I've noticed with XP on my mac is that some of the mac-specific hardware (the built in camera, for example) dosn't respond the way it should, and the Windows clock is wonky as all hell (it never holds a time if it's not connected to the net - I think this has something to do with the lack of a true BIOS, since I've had friends with older Macs that did the same thing when a battery on their motherboard died on them).
Can you tweek it to get even better performance (new drivers, software overclocking software, remapping keys to better emulate a "windows standard" keyboard, etc.)? Yes, and I believe that the majority of gamers who would bother installing bootcamp to play games are fully capable of such relativly minor optimizations. Even so, even assuming the person booting into windows is the most casual of casual gamers and utterly incapable of even installing a driver, the experiance you get using windows on a Macbook isn't radically different from what you would get on any other machine with equivilant hardware.
I really don't see why people can't just take the Bootcamp software for what it is. Between the Mac forum zealots claiming that it will destroy your computer for the sole reason that Windows is an abomination in the eyes of the Holy Prophet Jobs and the Windows nutjobs claiming that it will never be a "true gaming rig" (I suspect that these same people don't consdier it a true gaming rig unless it has the newest gear as of last weekend) I really sometimes wonder why have to wonder. . .
Ah well, you can all go on complaining about it and talking about how much it sucks, and I'll keep on playing Oblivion while on my lunchbreak at work.
Except Virtual PC on the Mac is actually an emulator and not a virtualizer. With VPC the CPU is emulated so it is mind-numbingly slow. Parallels on the Mac will virtualise the CPU if your CPU supports VT-x (although everything else is emulated).
Do yourself a favor. Run, don't walk, to the nearest computer hardware store and get the additional gig of RAM. It's a world of a difference.
My MacBook Pro felt slow with only one gig. Worse, when running lots of applications, or single applications which didn't behave too well, it would slow to a crawl, sometimes not accepting mouse clicks for seconds. With the second gigabyte, it's fast, snappy, responsive.
Don't run a MacBook Pro with only one gig, especially if you want to run stuff like Parallels.
Wow, what do you guys eat to get that high cpu cycles for an machine?
Just erase any unnecessary softwares out... seriously it's the best way to make your Windows run stable and fast.
I simply get 0% cpu cycle on my WinXP watching task manager's graph drawing a horizontal line at the bottom with about 300MB of unused RAM on a 512MB ram machine.
It's not the Windows... it's you that's abbusing the system resource.
It shouldn't but it does.
The MacBook Pro, for one.
You are wrong. Shush now.
Life isn't as bad as all that. First off, remove all unnecessary services to reduce both your memory footprint and your idle CPU consumption. You'll have to tweak that list a little, but my XP system at home runs in about 100MB of RAM with 1-2% CPU. It also only has 6 services running, and no AV software. It boots up in less than 40s, and that's on a 2.4 GHz P4 w/ 1GB RAM.
As for the no AV, if you don't download anything, don't use MS applications (use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim instead) and have a hardware firewall or two between you and the internet, the risk of a virus or worm is quite small. (I do occassionally install and run AV software for a check, or when I do download something from an unknown source)
Lastly, if you're running McAfee or Norton AV software, switch to something else. Both of those are resource hogs, both in memory and CPU. AVG seems a better product in that regard on all counts.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
2. Direct HD partition support so we can boot off the same 'system' and have the same applications and data
It's coming in a future release.
Lots of more info at the official Parallels blog.
I was under the impression that Windows XP can not be run from an external drive, be it USB or FireWire?
Any thoughts about that?
XP may, but Parallels can't use a VM file stored on an external USB drive according to the article. Other posters have indicated that running a VM stored on a FireWire drive does work.
Parallels lets me run any Windows version + apps inside a window on my OS X desktop.
Being a web designer, I can now do all my work on Mac OS X and switch back and forth to Windows + Internet Explorer in seconds (to check how barfingly ugly my work will look to MSIE visitors). Well worth it's money, even though gaming is not supported.
Boot Camp is just total nonsense in my situation. I'm just NOT willing to reboot for anything.
Lastly, Parallels with Windows XP Home Edition with no running apps takes up 6-7% CPU on my 1,66 GHz Core Duo Mac mini.