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Bootcamp instead of Parallels: worst mistake of my life?

B

Bobby Corwen

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jul 16, 2010
2,723
474
So I bought and installed a bootcamped version of Windows 8 for 2 main reasons: to play some random Win-only games, and to run FL Studio and some old non-mac plugins on it for the variety of rare sounds. I also wanted to lol at the lame "tiles" and see what they are up to these days.

But is this too old school?

Can some of you who run parallels (thats the "it" simulator right?) chime in on the difference in performance?

I also got 16GB Ram now in my 2012 uMBP 15.

I remember it used to be a duel between parallels and one other one but these days parralels is all i see mentioned.

Is it just as good as boot camp?

I regret it because I partitioned (you dont partition in parralels right?) and now its such a hassle to close all my windows and restart and more often than not I have something important running and I just feel like it was a mistake. And then Lord knows which OS its gonna start into when I restart the system and I always find Im worried about needing to hit option at boot and all types of minor hassles like that.

Im not running Crysis 2 or anything on windows, just some random medium games.

But if there is any noticable lag or slowdown that matters.

I just want to know what the experience is like on parallels? is it perfect?
 
ayeying

ayeying

macrumors 601
Dec 5, 2007
4,547
13
Yay Area, CA
Bobby Corwen said:
So I bought and installed a bootcamped version of Windows 8 for 2 main reasons: to play some random Win-only games, and to run FL Studio and some old non-mac plugins on it for the variety of rare sounds. I also wanted to lol at the lame "tiles" and see what they are up to these days.

But is this too old school?

Can some of you who run parallels (thats the "it" simulator right?) chime in on the difference in performance?

I also got 16GB Ram now in my 2012 uMBP 15.

I remember it used to be a duel between parallels and one other one but these days parralels is all i see mentioned.

Is it just as good as boot camp?

I regret it because I partitioned (you dont partition in parralels right?) and now its such a hassle to close all my windows and restart and more often than not I have something important running and I just feel like it was a mistake. And then Lord knows which OS its gonna start into when I restart the system and I always find Im worried about needing to hit option at boot and all types of minor hassles like that.

Im not running Crysis 2 or anything on windows, just some random medium games.

But if there is any noticable lag or slowdown that matters.

I just want to know what the experience is like on parallels? is it perfect?
Click to expand...

You have several options.

1) You can link Parallels to your bootcamp partition so you can run it with OSX.
2) You can migrate your Windows into Parallels and delete bootcamp partition. That way, you can only run windows with OSX.
3) You can reinstall Windows as a virtual machine only.

Will you see lag, depends. Honestly, I run 2-3 virtual machines on my system with only 8GB ram and I only see slow downs when all of them are trying to read the hard drive at once. Then again, I am fragmented so that adds onto time too.

For what you're doing, I feel you'll be fine with Parallels. Thats my opinion.
 
B

bogatyr

macrumors 65816
Mar 13, 2012
1,127
1
If you're playing games, stick with bootcamp, otherwise go virtual completely.

If you stick with bootcamp for playing games, I recommend getting Parallels or VMWare Fusion to run the bootcamp partition as a VM for any other Windows apps you run so you don't have to reboot to run normal Windows apps, just games.
 
W

wickedking94

macrumors 6502
Apr 27, 2010
271
4
I have parallels 7 with windows 7 and I can play Halo 2 and flight simulator X on decent settings, and my MBP isnt the greatest either:

2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo
8 GB DDR3
GeForce 320M 256MB

I have the virtual machine set up as follows:
Use 2 cores
Use 1GB of ram as graphics memory
Use 4 GB of ram for windows 7

The only issue I've ever had with running parallels instead of bootcamp was trying to root my Nexus 7 because it was a driver based application and parallels handles drivers a bit different.
 
D

drambuie

macrumors 6502a
Feb 16, 2010
751
1
bogatyr said:
If you're playing games, stick with bootcamp, otherwise go virtual completely.

If you stick with bootcamp for playing games, I recommend getting Parallels or VMWare Fusion to run the bootcamp partition as a VM for any other Windows apps you run so you don't have to reboot to run normal Windows apps, just games.
Click to expand...

That depends on your system. More than one person has reported that on the 27" 2012 iMac with the i7 CPU and 680MX GPU, Windows games run well at high settings with Parallels 8.
 
T

takeshi74

macrumors 601
Feb 9, 2011
4,974
68
Bobby Corwen said:
But is this too old school?
Click to expand...
Not sure what that means. It's one of several options and there are pros and cons to every option -- just like anything else out there. As mentioned above, you can do both simultaneously by having Parallels or Fusion run your Bootcamp partition, which is what I do.

Bobby Corwen said:
Can some of you who run parallels (thats the "it" simulator right?) chime in on the difference in performance?
Click to expand...
Depends on who you ask. There's always overhead with a virtual solution.

Bobby Corwen said:
I remember it used to be a duel between parallels and one other one but these days parralels is all i see mentioned.
Click to expand...
Fusion's mentioned quite a bit as well.

Bobby Corwen said:
I just want to know what the experience is like on parallels? is it perfect?
Click to expand...
Define "perfect". Again, every option has pros and cons. The ads are what drove me off of Parallels.
 
M

MJL

macrumors 6502a
Jun 25, 2011
845
1
Worst mistake in your life? What life have you got?

Can think of much worse things like marrying the wrong girl, making an error in traffic and have an accident and being paralised neck down etc etc.

There are far worse things.
 
skoldpadda

skoldpadda

macrumors 6502
Sep 28, 2010
360
2
MJL said:
Worst mistake in your life? What life have you got?

Can think of much worse things like marrying the wrong girl, making an error in traffic and have an accident and being paralised neck down etc etc.

There are far worse things.
Click to expand...

If your not going to atleast try to help the OP then why bother posting? :confused:

Bobby Corwen said:
Can some of you who run parallels (thats the "it" simulator right?) chime in on the difference in performance?

I remember it used to be a duel between parallels and one other one but these days parralels is all i see mentioned.

Is it just as good as boot camp?

Im not running Crysis 2 or anything on windows, just some random medium games.

But if there is any noticable lag or slowdown that matters.

I just want to know what the experience is like on parallels? is it perfect?
Click to expand...

The Two Main Products are Parallels and Fusion, I personally prefer Parallels.

No. It is not as good as bootcamp, but it is still very good. Think of it this way if you have 16GB RAM, In a VM you will never be able to utilise all of that RAM, bootcamp you can (64-bit Required).

Nothing is perfect, but parallels is an amazing bit of software.

Go to parallels, download the 14 day trial and try it for yourself, play around with the RAM and see how it runs for you, if you enjoy the experience, Buy It. If you don't BOOTCAMP and when you bootcamp install a bootloader so you can choose what Operating System you boot to rather than pressing ALT.

http://www.parallels.com/uk/download/desktop/
 
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