Parallels vs Boot Camp

First off, let me say I have pre-ordered Parallels so it should be obvious which way I would like to pursue. I sure could use some opinions of all the beta testers and maybe even the Parallels team on my path to pursue.

I come from a Windows background and am new to the Mac environment. I purchased my wife an iMac with the intent she might enjoy the graphics design capabilities of the Mac. She runs her business on a Windows machine and has MYOB accounting software, Adobe PageMaker and Microsoft Office products as her main apps. The plan was to continue running these apps on the iMac through Parallels and possibly convert at a next version change if possible.

Her Windows machine died Thursday evening and it appears a motherboard failure. Since I'm going to have to do a rebuild, what would you all suggest?

- Get a new motherboard and stay in a total Windows environment for the time being.

- Establish a Windows partition via Boot Camp.

- Create a virtual with Parallels.

It has to be stable enough for her to run her business on and if possible, be able to convert to a final product without a total rebuild again.

I appreciate any wisdom you all could give me.

Thanks.

 

I was in a similar situation, my older laptop died and I had to decide on buying a regular Windows laptop or a MacBook Pro. I decided to go with the MacBook pro, taking a chance that either Bootcamp or Parallels Workstation would be robust enough, even if in beta, to run the applications that I require in a business production environment. On the Windows side, I'm a heavy user of MS Office, MS Visio, MS Project, MindManager. These all work fine on both Bootcamp and Parallels Workstation.

I was using Bootcamp for a couple of weeks in a production environment and didn't have any major issues (Current limitations like the inability to control the brightness intensity on the Windows side doesn't really bother me, the inability to shut off the speakers while listening to headphones doesn't affect me...).

I switched to Parallels Workstation about 3 weeks ago and loved it for the ability to toggle between the Mac and WindowsXP. I have experienced the following limitations:

- USB flash drive (key) doesn't work (I have 3 of them and none of them work)
- CD/DVD burner can only read disks, it cannot burn
- shared folder crashes regularly which results in me having to reboot the machine

If I'm not trying to get files in/out of the environment then I'm fine, the applications run well. Since I work on different computer systems both at home and at the office, I require the ability to exchange files between the different systems and the Parallels Workstation environment is currently unable to accomodate my requirement. I created a share between the Mac and Windows though it is slow, many times it doesn't work at all and forces me to reboot in order to get the share to work again...

I've been holding on for the last 2 weeks for a possible new beta to fix these issues though this hasn't happened yet. Since I need the laptop for business, I'm in the process of reloading Bootcamp at the moment since I cannot wait any longer to get files in/out of Parallels workstation.

I'll continue to watch for updates to Parallels Workstation and as soon as it's stable enough and have resolved the issues mentioned above, I'll go back to using it instead of Bootcamp.

Now back to Windows and application installs on Bootcamp

 

Shared folders unnecessary with networking?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I find the shared folders as implemented less than useful. I can move files back and forth over the network between the guest OS and either OSX or another machine.

Auto sharing with drag and drop between environments (share that one file as it's dragged and dropped) would be useful and wouldn't compromise the sandbox since it would require manual input for each transaction. I'd use that if it existed. So for now, I just treat host and guest as separate machines networked and use standard network permissions to control access.

 

I think you will be fine with parallels VM for a quick fix. In the long run, why not just use OS X for the 3 applications mention? Office files are transparent to platform. You probable will want to upgrade pagemaker but again not problem with data transfer. I am not that familiar with MYOB but they supported the Mac when intuit drop Quickbooks. Ironically when they brought quickbooks back to the Mac, it a great product in that the data files can be read on either platform. Quicken really sucks when it comes to switching because the data transfer is very difficult. The data transfer between MYOB is something I am not sure about.

 

I was hoping to wait on converting to Macintosh versions when they went universal. Is this a non-event? Should I go ahead and plan on switching?

 

Office runs great. Pagemaker and Indesign run great too. QuarkExpress is Universal binary. You need to get something going quick so your ideal of waiting for the next release by Microsoft and Adobe is a good ideal in my opinion.

 

As far as running Windows apps goes, Boot Camp seems to be incredibly stable (more so than Parallels at this point). Of course, the big plus to Parallels is that you can use it side by side with Mac apps. Between the two, you're good to go on the Mac, IMHO.

 

All boot camp does is partition the drive, give you windows drivers for the mac hardware, and let windows boot in spite of the mac having EFI instead of BIOS. Once windows is booted, it's all windows. So you might as well say "windows is more stable than parallels" because that's the comparison you are making.

 

If PW were already released, my vote would go with this solution. However, at present Boot Camp is more stable, so if you really need to choose now, I would say BC. I have a pretty full suite of Windows software in a Boot Camp partition, and so far it has worked flawlessly.

I would also choose to format the BC partition as FAT32 -- you give up some robustness, but get easy read/write migration of files while running OS X.

However, once PW is stable, I think you should look at migrating -- it will be a grind, but well, worht the trouble.
--Tim

 

PW vs BC

Although the above are limitations, there are reliable solutions:
For USb flash drive and file sharing, you could use smb networking. get sharePoints which creates mounting points on OS X that the windows side will see. It is very reliabe, I have used it heavily for a grant project without problems.
Regarding burning you could probably save something as an iso image and burn it in OSX.
I find PW very reliable to the point I erased the bootcamp partition. PW s still beta though, and nasty crashes have been reported by others.