I am a long time wintel user that desperately wants to make the jump from the darkside over to the Apple World. I recently purchased a 17 inch high res MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and 2.4ghz Core Duo. I am a stock trader by trade, so during the day, I need to run a lot of Wintel based programs that are both memory and speed hogs. I recently bought Parallels 3.0 and t allows me to run these programs, however there is some degradation from an operating perspective in those programs when running them in P 3.0. So my question is, should I be running the program settings differently in 3.0 or would I best be suited using a program like Bootcamp, where the whole machine's performance would be dedicated to running Wintel programs when I boot the Mac in XP? Does Bootcamp provide the best operating performance for running both Mac programs and Wintel programs? I love the new Mac - but business is business and I need to get the Wintel programs running properly before I can set myself free. I realize this is a Parallels board - and I want to keep using that product for my Mac - but I wanted to see what more experienced users might have to say about this issue. Many thanks in advance.
Running Native is always going to be faster than running in a virtual session. Booting to Windows via Boot Camp is going to run Windows applications faster because Windows has exclusive access to your system and all its memory. Running apps via Parallels is sharing resources with OS X, so there is less memory and CPU cycles. You can try setting the VM to allow more resources to Windows apps, but you're still limited. For right now, if you want speed, run them under Boot Camp. If you want convenience, use Parallels or Fusion. From what I was reading, the Boot Camp support built into Leopard will allow faster switching - it will load each session without rebooting. That's October though, so it's up to you whether you mind rebooting every time you need to run a Windows application (personally I got sick of needing to reboot just to bang out an invoice in QuickBooks. As a result I fell behind on my billing.) -Z
Thanks Z. Do you know if I can access the windows programs I installed in Parallel in Bootcamp or do I need to load them again?
I have somewhat of the same situation as you. Daytime I need quite a lot of power doing calculations and simulations. For those times I use BootCamp. If not, I use Parallels with my BootCamp installation, works flawless after you have set you MAC-address to avoid the dreaded Microsoft Office Activation trouble when switching between BootCamp and Parallels. The link for the Office fix is here -> http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=10340 -n
Bootcamp is a good if you don't need to switch back and forth to the Mac very often. You will have to reboot each time. How much memory have you given the VM? If you have 3GB, I would try various increments between 500MB and 850MB to see which gives you the best performance. Sometimes, less is more, but this should not be an issue if you have 3GB total.
