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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."
No. For starters, it can't directly access the graphics hardware, which makes it useless for almost any 3D gaming. It also uses an enormous amount of CPU time sitting around doing absolutely nothing. Seriously- XP, sitting doing nothing, nothing open- uses 20% of my Macbook's CPU. In Qemu (or rather, the Q Project build of QEMU), it's under 5%...and QEMU is emulating, whereas Parallels supposedly is using virtualization technology. What the hell?
If only Boot Camp and XP supported external drives (you have to hack XP considerably, unless you're using eSATA, I think)...
Please help metamoderate.
Ok, for everyone that thinks, i.e., assumes and doesn't know, that Boot Camp from Apple or Parallel's Desktop for Macintosh were created for gamers, you're dead wrong!
Neither product claims to be able to play games, nor offers much in the way of support for gaming. Although, Boot Camp and running Windows XP natively on the hardware will certainly give you a better chance of doing so.
These applications are for people (like me) who work in an office that is Windows abundant so they can run stupid, lousy, poorly written pieces of software like Outlook and can get on the Exchange server to do what they're already doing BETTER with an open source product running someplace else. It's also for those of us that need access to applications like AutoCAD from time-to-time or some other application that only runs under Windows.
Yes, for some, the desire to play Windows-based games is driving them to these products, but they're no where near ready for that crowd. Parallels Desktop is RC2 and even though it has a version number of 2.1, it's really the first revision for the Intel-based Macs. Boot Camp, well, it's clearly labeled on the web page as "Public BETA", i.e., use at your own peril.
Please stop bashing a product simply because it doesn't do what you want it to do even though it wasn't designed (or intended) to do that task. Parallels is a very capable virtual machine application and is very easy to setup and use. As someone who has used a dual-boot system as his primary machine, I can tell you (IMHO) the Parallels product kicks dual booting in the ass! Dual boot is fine if you're only going to use the one partition for gaming. If you're talking about a work environment where you need to switch back and forth fairly regularly, dual-booting sucks! Again, IMHO.