Hi Mac Format magazine - argues that Boot Camp is superior because virtualisation makes applications like Photoshop run very slowly but it also "won't recognise Mac graphics" so no video! Also says that "even relatively ordinary tasks, such as loading a CD or connecting to a network, can require a huge amount of fiddling about with settings". This is counter to what I have researched on this site but as someone on the fence between Boot Camp and V.Desktop it does worry me. Penny for your thoughts!
I love Parallels. It works extremely well. It's not a good solution for graphics-intensive work, due to somewhat slow graphics support, but for anything short of video editing or games, I find Parallels to be a great solution. I do have Boot Camp on my iMac for the sole purpose of booting into it to play 3D games.
PD doesn't seem to support graphics cards, while BootCamp does. However, I'm not playing Unreal Tournament in PD, but for those few times I wanted to try out Half-Life, I did boot into BootCamp's partition. BootCamp is only better at graphics, i haven't noticed any other major improvements (apart from the fact that you're running only one OS at a time!) However, there are not many things that make me want to shut down my entire mac (with it's iTunes, websharing, FTP serving and other Mac progs running) just to run Windows, so PD is the far better solution for me. Like the previous guy said, if you're dying for a PC-only 3D game, BootCamp is there for you, and your Mac can readily be turned into a VideoGame console.
Yeah, for nearly everything I do, Parallels is perfect. Having to reboot out of Mac OS (and lose access to my email program, etc) is sucky, so I only do it when I really need to.
I think the magazine's review tested something like beta2. Most of the issues have been fixed in the current version.
Thanks all - good clear advice. For my occaisional but necessary Windows use - I'll go with Parallels. I thought the magazine article was very Boot Camp orientated, although amusingly it did have a shot of a XP in a VM window on an iMac at the intro to the article!!!
