Buying an Apple Monday - Leopard/bootcamp/parallels Question

[NYU02]

I am going to buy a new apple computer Monday and I was hoping someone could clear some concerns of mine. I need to run windows programs for work and I am leaning towards parallels because the new software allows you to run the actual program in the apple OS with parallels coherence but I am not totally sold over boot camp. So here are my questions:

1) ***(I am very confused)***If I install Boot Camp now (as a beta and NOT supported by apple) and Leopard comes out and I upgrade my OS how does Leopard adjust to my previously installed boot camp? I know Leopard supports boot camp and its not beta. Does it automatically update my bootcamp and now it becomes supported by Leopard and apple? or does it erase it and its a mess? THANKS

2) Does the new parallels 3.0 handle basically everything that boot camp can handle (I won't be playing games). Has anyone used the new features like coherence and how well does that work?

3) I know parallels is virtualization software - while running parallels does it slow down the computer in general? Even when its not running are there any "issues" with parallels that I'm not aware of?

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR ALL YOUR HELP AND INSIGHT!
NYU02

 

[captainbeefheat]

Can't really answer your questions about parallels as I just use bootcamp but would say it really depends how much your running and how powerful your computer is, Vista itself with all its eye candy is pretty intensive but I assume must be usable as people seem to be using it. However as regards to the Leopard I would imagine it would just install over the top, that is how all the betas have worked so far. You can if you want remove bootcamp from your system anyway so you could do that before install leopard if you wished to have a clean install of it. Bootcamp beta seems pretty stable to me anyway, just one or two problems here and there which was probably windows at any rate!

 

[M@lew]

1) No idea, we'll have to see. You could always make an image of your Boot Camp partition and move it over if you have to when Leopard comes out.

2) Yes, if it's not very heavy 3D things. Coherence is good, but VMware's unity is better.

3) Yes.

 

[NYU02]

Is VMware better then parallels? Isn't it still in beta? Is it more stable?

Thanks,
NYU02

 

[theBB]

Is VMware better then parallels? Isn't it still in beta? Is it more stable?
NYU02

I don't know about its stability, but beta also means it is free.

 

[chadi]

I had nothing but good things to say about Parallels 2.x but 3.x has been less than stable on my macbook pro.

There are ways to keep it stable but if you do things like put the mbp to sleep with a XP session running it causes crazy stability issues when you wake it up.

Among other things, I turned off all the 3d stuff...I guess it's a good direction but for me I'd rather just have it stable and use it for what I need (which is supporting SBS customers using RWW with IE 7 and MS Office 2k7 vs OpenOffice demo's + Quickbooks since all my accounting is currently in that format).

YMMV,
Chad