Running Windows on a Mac: Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop & VMware Fusion

[thetruthkc]

Great post. I needed this about 2 weeks ago... at this point i'm mostly using bootcamp to boot into Vista for work.

I boot OSX to play around in (surf the internet, IM). But very rarely.

[cashmonee]

Stickied. Now please let's make sure that we keep posts on topic. Any posts not on topic will be deleted and ABSOLUTELY NO WINDOWS VS OS X. This thread will be to help people get Windows running on Mac hardware regardless of their reasoning.

[SoundsGood]

Does Parallels display separate Windows windows in Expose yet, like VMware does?

[fire666]

Vmware fusion VS Parralels
Pros and cons?

[cashmonee]

Be sure to check out the Windows on a Mac sticky. There is some comparison between the two there.

Merged with that thread.

[Sam]

Does Parallels display separate Windows windows in Expose yet, like VMware does?

Hmmm, from the Parallels website I don't see anywhere that says Displays Windows applications in Expose, but they do say Parallels has the Coherence feature (similar to Vmware's Unity) so you can run Windows applications without the Parallels window open.

[votoms888]

I ran parallels on my iMac before I sold it. Worked quite well actually. However, for the MBP I picked up last night I installed Bootcamp 1.3 and did a full Vista Home Prem. install. Everything is working like a gem right now. I will install all my software tonight and see how it goes. All in all my opinion is, if you really need 100% computing power while utilizing the windows environment I would go with Bootcamp.

[Geek94]

Great post. I'd like to see more of a comparison between parallels and fusions.

[dbam987]

I like the ability for either Parallels or Fusion to load up a VM from a boot camp partition. That is an extremely handy feature to have.

There is one big difference between the two that might ultimately force you to choose Parallels over Fusion, and that is in the DirectX support. Parallels supports DirectX 9.0, while Fusion at this time only supports DirectX 8.1. This means several current games might not run under Fusion.

Does WoW use DirectX 8.1 or 9.0?

[Sam]

I like the ability for either Parallels or Fusion to load up a VM from a boot camp partition. That is an extremely handy feature to have.

There is one big difference between the two that might ultimately force you to choose Parallels over Fusion, and that is in the DirectX support. Parallels supports DirectX 9.0, while Fusion at this time only supports DirectX 8.1. This means several current games might not run under Fusion.

Does WoW use DirectX 8.1 or 9.0?

Well, right now there's only a list of games that are officially confirmed to be playable on VMware Fusion. My original sticky post has the list of games available, and WoW isn't on there.

But would you really want to run games virtually anyways? It would consume much more resources than running games in Boot Camp would.