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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.
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.
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.