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Parallels and bootcamp

I

ivorito

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 29, 2010
41
0
Hi,
I'm thinking of getting parallels on my macbook as I can get it for £35. I'm currently running snow leopard and also have windows 7 on bootcamp.
So I was wondering, how does the performance on parallels differ to bootcamp? Are games still playable?

I'm thinking this because I gather parallels can run your bootcamp partition, but also you can do a fresh install of windows parallels.
When you install it on parallels does it share storage with the mac side of life or does it have it's own partition?
If it has to be partitioned I will just run bootcamp but if not I will delete my bootcamp and then install it through parallels (space is a premium).

By the way, my computer is a macbook 2010 white, intel core 2 duo, with 8gb of ram and only 250gb hdd
 
R

robgendreau

macrumors 68040
Jul 13, 2008
3,465
329
A virtual machine will necessarily run slower, but whether this makes a difference to you depends on what software you're running. Games sometimes use a lot of a computer's resources, so it may show up more in that instance than in word processing. YMMV.

You can run a Windows installation virtually and in Bootcamp; it should require only one Windows license, although some people have to call MS to straighten that out. Less of a problem with recent versions, but in the past Windows would assume it had been installed on a different machine.

You do not have to partition a drive to create a virtual machine and a virtual boot drive for that machine; it just looks like a big ol' file to your Mac.
 
T

takeshi74

macrumors 601
Feb 9, 2011
4,974
68
ivorito said:
So I was wondering, how does the performance on parallels differ to bootcamp?
Click to expand...
Any solution such as Parallels and VMware has some overhead that doesn't exist with Bootcamp.

ivorito said:
Are games still playable?
Click to expand...
Depends on the game.

Set up Bootcamp and try it out. You can set up Parallels later (and use both Bootcamp and Parallels) and see how it works for you.
 
I

ivorito

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 29, 2010
41
0
robgendreau said:
You do not have to partition a drive to create a virtual machine and a virtual boot drive for that machine; it just looks like a big ol' file to your Mac.
Click to expand...

That sounds great, do you allocate it a certain size or does the big ol' file just get bigger as you have more stuff on it?
 
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