I'm not seeing much of a difference. I was under the impression that VMware just opens a windows program on my mac... almost making it look like the program ran on OSX... however, I started to install and it's asking for my windows xp installation disk... is this just so it has the info to run the program or does it simply give another way to run windows?
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Boot Camp VS VMware
- Thread starter trev
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You are fundamentally misunderstanding VMware. VMware is a virtualisation environment. It allows you to run a full copy of Windows whilst still running OSX by presenting Windows with a virtual PC to run in. VMware does not, on it's own, allow you to run Windows programs or alter their appearance in anyway. BootCamp on the otherhand allows you to reboot into Windows without OSX running.
so basically, once I install FMware then I can run windows in a new "window" which is in osx rather than rebooting in xp? If I'm right, then I have another question. Can I see the real drive from the virtual drive and vice versa? i.e. how easy is it to share files?
Pretty much correct.
It's pretty easy to share files. More an issue of drag + drop or just have the files on OSX anyway.
VM Ware and Parallels run Windows pretty fast, but be aware that there are some things, mainly programs that use DirectX (3D games) that they just won't do. In that case, you do have the option of running Windows via Boot Camp, in which case those things will run just as if it were on a PC.
Also awful since some CAD programs need as much RAM and CPU as possible.
And if they are in 3d you're better off bootcamping.
I don't know about CAD. I do use Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 for video editing and run it via Parallels.