Installing Parallels from Boot Camp Partition - stable long-term?

[Frankenstein]

I just bought a 2012 13" uMBP (first Mac), and I am planning to install Parallels and Windows 8 (64-bit). I am mainly (99%+ probably) going to use Windows for MS Office (need analysis tool pack for stat/finance classes, plus I have a couple of licenses already), which I think Parallels will handle fine, but I also think that it would be good to have the option to use Boot Camp just in case in the future. Also, I do not play any PC games, so not even sure why I would use Boot Camp, but you never know.

I was planning to install Windows 8 through Boot Camp and then point Parallels to the Boot Camp partition, but I came across several different threads today that pointed out headaches that route can cause down the road when updating various drivers, etc. I also noticed that there are trade offs to that approach; mainly losing the ability to pause/suspend Windows when using Parallels. I have a single-license full copy of Windows 8, so I want to make sure I choose the best route the first time through (although, not sure that re-installation wouldn't work since it would be on the same computer, but just to be safe and avoid any calls to Microsoft).

For my use case, would it be better (i.e. more headache proof) to just install Windows through Parallels and forget about Boot Camp? And can anyone confirm or deny the long-term stability of using Parallels through the Boot Camp partition?

If I do choose to install through Boot Camp, should I wait for 10.8.3 to be released to get the proper Windows 8 drivers, or could I install now and update the drivers later without harm?

Thanks!

 

[Stooby Mcdoobie]

I would go the VM route in your position. It's just more convenient and I don't see any reason you'd ever need to boot into Windows natively. Word processing and Excel will work perfectly fine in a VM.

But if you think you'd ever want to boot into Windows, you can set up Boot Camp and then use that same partition in Parallels as a VM. This is the most flexible route as you can boot into Windows, or fire up the VM while in OS X. Only problem is you cannot resize the Windows partition after its creation, where as a VM dynamically grows and shrinks itself.