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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."
The application looks like something from Windows 3.11
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.
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.
Or VPC because that's all it is. It's just a virtualizer. The advantages are you don't need to leave your main OS, you can have multiple guests, even runnig at the same thing if your system is powerful enough, and it probaly supports some kind of snapshot system, like VMWare. The disadvantages are of course the same as with VMware, mainly speed and hardware support. At least until VT support gets ramped up or hypervisors become popular you aren't going to get anywhere near native speeds. Also at this point the hardware in VMs is pretty low level. If you have a nice pro 3D card or multi-channel audio card, your guest OSes will not have access to their features.
Like Boot Camp, I think Parallels it getting more hype than it mertis just because it happens ot run on OS-X. Yep, it virtualizes a computer and lets you run Linux or Windows at a reasonable speed. Ok great, same thing as VMWare on a Linux or Windows host. Certianly not worthless, but nothing that's really news.
Use a native install (Boot Camp) if it's speed and access to hardware that are the prime requirements and you are willing to spend time booting back and forth. Use a virtualizer if you just need incidental access to the other OS and can take teh speed hit.
- Hardware accellerated graphics - doesn't need to be perfect or native-speed, but anything is better than software (I hate the current redraws when resizing windows)
- Direct HD partition support so we can boot off the same 'system' and have the same applications and data, with the only thing needed being a seperate Hardware profile in Windows - would make things a lot easier to use and convenient (Boot directly into windows for games, boot in Parallels for work, as needed)
Plus I would add a third: bring the price back down to $49.99 as it was originally.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.
So.. what you're saying is that Windows is a better OS than Linux for your casual user friends?
SHOCKING!!
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.
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.
There is something inherently wrong with a design of an OS when you're asking the user to be strong willed and willing to make sacrafices (in this case happiness) in the name of the OS. I have a great idea: how about you show your friends a great alternative to the program they want to use in windows or make their system run firefox as smooth in linux as it does Windows. If you can't manage this task, you need to step down from your high horse and accept that all your friends aren't willing to make the sacrifices that you are in the name of supporting Linux. Sheeple will admit their flaws, will the zealots?
This is being typed in Safari on OS X.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
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.
The main advantage to Parallels for me (I've been trying it since it initial release, btw) is the simple fact that I don't have to reboot to run Windows. Bootcamp doesn't cut it, if I need to exit my computing environment just to work on a Visio document or some other Windows app. I don't want to lose access to the rest of my online world in those cases.
I've been using Parallels Workstation for the Mac (or whatever they call it now) for a couple of months now. I admin a respectably-sized Active Directory and radmind'ed Mac network. We also have a dozen or so OpenBSD servers in our closet, so having a machine that can work with Windows, Macs, and has all of my fun UNIX tools is great. For years I've had two or three boxes connected via a KVM, but this is superior. I have a dual-display set up with my Intel iMac, with Parallels (WinXP) in one display, and the MacOS in the other. I can share files between the two, and I don't need to fiddle with a KVM switch, which never really seems to handle USB device removal/insertion very well.
This is the ultimate test of Parallels in my mind: I am running the Exchange 5.5 Administrator tool on my Mac (we have a legacy 5.5 install that we're migration away from). Do any of you realize what a perversion this is? It runs great!
Oh, and the Parallels team is super-responsive to bug reports. I am quite happy with this product.
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.