Bootcamp and Parallels with XP.

[tillsbury]

Anyone doing this on an MBPr? The only things I need to run on Windows will be fine on XP (and in fact a couple of them will only run on XP). So why not just have a Bootcamp XP partition that runs those bits and bobs, under parallels, and Steam and one or two other things?

This will be a much smaller partition surely, being XP instead of Win7?

And/or can I run two Bootcamp partitions, one with W7 and one with XP? It seems like a bit of overkill to run Win7 Ultimate 64-bit with a Virtual mode XP window in it, all in parallels in OSX, just to run one poky little XP program!

 

[Feed Me]

A boot camp partition, on parallels?

You seem to be getting confused between the two 😛

Bootcamp: Partitioning your drive and installing and natively running windows by booting into it at startup. Apple only supplies drivers for windows 7 as far as I know.

Parallels (or other virtual machine software): A virtual windows machine that runs just like a real machine (e.g. Like in bootcamp) but that doesn't require you to boot into the OS. You just open it up like an app.

if you need to run XP I think you'll have to use a virtual machine.

 

[tillsbury]

I understood that the latest Parallels could run the Bootcamp partition virtually, allowing you to have a Windows Bootcamp partition (which you could run by rebooting), but access applications and data within that same partition from a virtual machine in OSX? Have I got that wrong? That's what I was meaning by running a Parallels Bootcamp partition. I don't want to have two different XP virtual machines going on, that would get far too complicated. I'm used to running an XP machine within Win7.

----------

If you're saying that Bootcamp won't run XP, then how well does XP run virtually in OSX?

 

[Feed Me]

I understood that the latest Parallels could run the Bootcamp partition virtually, allowing you to have a Windows Bootcamp partition (which you could run by rebooting), but access applications and data within that same partition from a virtual machine in OSX? Have I got that wrong? That's what I was meaning by running a Parallels Bootcamp partition. I don't want to have two different XP virtual machines going on, that would get far too complicated. I'm used to running an XP machine within Win7.

----------

If you're saying that Bootcamp won't run XP, then how well does XP run virtually in OSX?

Ahh I wasn't aware of that feature,you may well be right.
I've run XP briefly in a VM and it was fine (2.6ghz dual core, 4gb of RAM)
XP's a very old operating system, so I'd confidently say that any modern mac can run it in a VM very smoothly. The rMBP is a bit of a beast as well, so XP performance should be very good.

 

[leenak]

Yes you can load a bootcamp partition through Parallels. I'm doing that with Windows 7 right now. It works very well.

I'm not sure about Windows XP because currently Apple only has the drivers to support Windows 7 and Windows 8. You could try it though, couldn't hurt.