Boot Camp vs Parallels

[Poseidon]

In buying a Mac I'm discovering that there's still one program from my PC that I really need to have at my disposal, and it just won't run on OS X. (Very handy little password manager called Roboform.)

Anyway, I know that in theory both Boot Camp and Parrells will allow me to run XP from within the machine and that Parrells doesn't require me to reboot to get the XP window while Boot Camp does.

Beyond that, does anyone have suggestions one way or the other? I'm currently leaning towards Boot Camp since it's free right now but I'm certainly willing to go the other way if Parrells is markedly better.

Thanks!

 

[rogersmj]

Yeah this question gets asked every week...

Here's what it boils down to: do you really want to reboot every time you want to use that one XP app? Rebooting is a serious hassle for me because I keep so many things running all the time. Parallels has paid for itself in productivity hours many times over. It is an invaluable tool to me to be able to run my two XP-dependent programs without ever leaving my OS X womb. I think Parallels is definitely worth it if it's something you're going to be using almost every day.

 

[HawaiiMacAddict]

Actually, there is "the best of both worlds." The latest version of Parallels allows a virtual machine to be created from a Boot Camp partition. If, for example, Poseidon were to choose the Boot Camp option due to its price, and subsequently were to tire of having to reboot to go from one OS to the other, he can then simply purchase Parallels and get the latest update to create his VM from the Boot Camp partition. In that way, he can keep the existing partition, but not have to boot directly into it for access to the program he wants to use.

HawaiiMacAddict

 

[M@lew]

Actually, there is "the best of both worlds." The latest version of Parallels allows a virtual machine to be created from a Boot Camp partition. If, for example, Poseidon were to choose the Boot Camp option due to its price, and subsequently were to tire of having to reboot to go from one OS to the other, he can then simply purchase Parallels and get the latest update to create his VM from the Boot Camp partition. In that way, he can keep the existing partition, but not have to boot directly into it for access to the program he wants to use.

HawaiiMacAddict

He COULD do that, but if he would still need to reboot in order to have 3D acceleration.