Is using Parallels on your Mac to DL Windows worth it?

Installing Windows with Parallels should take about 35-40 minutes - about as long as on a PC, maybe a little faster on a Mac. Expect to use about 4 or 5 Gigs of hard drive space. If you've installed Windows before you won't find it any harder to do, in fact Parallels makes it easier as most of the settings for your virtual machine will be automatically based on your Mac's specs.

It will slow down your computer a little bit because both the mac and the virtual Windows will be competing for the same RAM, but not so much that your mac becomes unusable.

You can download a 14-day trial of Parallels:
http://www.parallels.com/download/desktop/

With a Windows Live ID, you can download a 90-day trial of Windows 7:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/cc442495

 

The bigger reason for the slowdown is your CPU, as half the cores in your CPU (by default) will be assigned to Windows. Provided you have 4 GB or more RAM, it shouldn't be much of an issue that way.

 

The core assignment is usually dynamic. You only set the maximum amount of cores that the VM is allowed to use at any load level. If you set 2 of 4 than even when OSX idles the VM takes only 2 cores under full load. Or if you have multiple VMs running you can limit each to 1 core or something.

Via msdnaa you can get a couple Windows licenses for free. If you are a computer science, MIS student or anything similar chances are good your university offers msdnaa accounts for you. You need to be a student of course.
Parallels is never free unless you hack it. I would also recommend VMWare Fusion as it is more stable and trouble free in my experience. For gaming and 3D acc. use native Windows via bootcamp.
VirtualBox is a free VM but it is usually more hassle. I would try it though if is enough for you there is no reason to pay for VMware or Parallels.

 

VirtualBox blows away Parallels at running Linux OSes - so if this is of interest keep that in mind. I have not tried VMware Fusion yet. Since Parallels, VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox all are virtual machines, they require a VDD (virtual disk drive) file to store the guest OS's data. This defaults to expanding storage with a limit - which saves space on your host OS drive, since the VDD uses only as much space as it needs.