Why do people have BootCamp Parition with VMWare???

[machomer]

I will be purchasing Parallels or VMware in order to run some Windows apps for school. I searched the forums and it VMWare has more posts than Parallels. Is VMware the the way to go?

I then saw a few posts about having a Boot Camp Partition in addition to the vitualization software. Is this needed? If not, what are the benefits of having BootCamp and VMWare or Parallels?

 

[Cromulent]

I will be purchasing Parallels or VMware in order to run some Windows apps for school. I searched the forums and it VMWare has more posts than Parallels. Is VMware the the way to go?

I then saw a few posts about having a Boot Camp Partition in addition to the vitualization software. Is this needed? If not, what are the benefits of having BootCamp and VMWare or Parallels?

Gaming is one of the major reasons to have a boot camp partition. VMWare is always going to be slower than running Windows in its native environment.

 

[justflie]

Same here. When I game, I use Boot Camp. When I just need to run into windows to grab a file or something like that, I use VMWare (pointing to my Boot camp partition). After all, why have 2 Windows installations on the same computer. Haha, having one on my Mac is bad enough as it is!

 

[2ms]

So is VMWare basically the better choice over Parallels these days? If it depends, then please elaborate?
thanks

 

[72930]

So is VMWare basically the better choice over Parallels these days? If it depends, then please elaborate?
thanks

In my opinion, yes. Parallels seem to release features more often than VMWare, but their software can be buggy, and Fusion is faster than Parallels.

 

[kygeographer]

So is VMWare basically the better choice over Parallels these days? If it depends, then please elaborate?
thanks

I would have to agree with pyschofreak. VMWare runs circles around Parallels, at least on my Macbook.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but VMWare can take advantage of both cores on a Core 2 Duo processor, as well as support 64 bit operating systems. Parallels does neither.

 

[user13]

So is VMWare basically the better choice over Parallels these days? If it depends, then please elaborate?
thanks

Well, I'll be the one to defend Parallels, then
Parallels really release add-ons often and support their products. The product is very reliable. On the contrary I didn't hear much about VM Ware Fusion development, no publicity at all. That's what I like about Parallels most of all. On top of all, I can't complain about the speed of Parallels. I have 2 Gigs of RAM, performance is optimal. Well, anyway it's your choice, maybe try both?
Boot Camp, of course, is better for gaming than any VM, because of RAM allotment. Boot Camp uses all of your system resources for windows and gaming. Still Parallels supports a few games, but only those that require DX 8.1 if I'm not mistaken

 

[fredr500]

My Fusion experience

First - I am not a gamer.

I have a mac pro with 6GB of memory. I loaded Fusion and created 3 VMs for WinXP, have allocated 2 processors and 2GB of memory to one, 1 processor and 1GB to the others.

I have not found a single problem with Fusion. It is very fast, runs everything I've thrown at it, and am happy with it.

Why 3 VMs? Well, I replaced 2 windows machines with the mac pro. I set up a VM for each, used MoveMe and replicated each physical machine in a VM. When I want to do something that was on machine 1, I fire up that VM. Same for the other. Both can be running at the same time, while I am doing other work in OS X. Resources can be assigned and changed on the fly, moving a CD or USB device from machine to machine.

When one gives a bluescreen or asks for a reboot, that VM does it while the rest of the machine keeps right on running.

The third XP VM is for experiments, beta code, sketchy downloads/websites, etc. If it has a problem, it is not a big deal to go back to the clean snapshot and recover immediately.

Fusion has made my transition to mac painless.

(I never tried Parallels, so I can not compare them, I tried Fusion and it met my needs so I stopped looking.)

Fred

 

[sulhaq]

I have a question. I'd like to try out VMware after reading this thread. Can I safely do that with my bootcamp partition without Parallels going haywire? Since it is also using the same bootcamp partition to load windows.

I wouldn't run them both at the same time of course but just to be sure I wanna know if I can do that. (Run Windows from the same bootcamp partition for both VMware and Parallels, but not at the same time of course)