I read on a another thread that Parallels has Parallels Bootcamp which allows me to install Parallels using only one Windows license. Would this work also with the OEM version of windows as well? Or is the full version of windows needed too?
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Parallel Bootcamp and Windows OEM
- Thread starter dorky24
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OEM and Retail are the same from an OS & installation point of view, it's only the licensing and packaging that are different.
If you install Windows to a Boot Camp partition, Parallels (or VMWare Fusion) can create a VM using the existing BC installation and activation.
VMWare has historically been a little less troublesome than Parallels from an activation viewpoint (my own experience with Fusion was seamless and transparent), but my understanding is that Parallels is better about it now. I'm sure there are others that can chime in on that.
If you install Windows to a Boot Camp partition, Parallels (or VMWare Fusion) can create a VM using the existing BC installation and activation.
VMWare has historically been a little less troublesome than Parallels from an activation viewpoint (my own experience with Fusion was seamless and transparent), but my understanding is that Parallels is better about it now. I'm sure there are others that can chime in on that.
This is often said, but is still not true.
OEM will not allow you to upgrade in place from Vista, retail will. The differences between them are many besides licensing, packaging and support.
In either case, OEM or retail, you may well run into activation "issues" with a shared Boot Camp/VM installation as they can be detected as separate computers. The main difference is that retail is more lenient, because the license allows it to be transferred, while OEM can shut you down cold as it is not intended to be transferred between computers.
VMWare and Parallels try to prevent this by having the VM look like a separate hardware configuration of the same machine (as if it was a docked laptop). I personally have run into trouble here where during an upgrade of VMWare it "saw" a different hardware configuration briefly while VMWare Tools was not installed and kicked off the this Windows is not genuine warning and forced me to re-activate.
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