I have recently purchased a shiney new copy of parallelllllsll for mac. with the sole desire to play my old pc games on my nice new imac. Now I learn that Direct X is not supporting, writing off nearly all the titles I own. Could someone give me a rundown of how I now install windows using boot camp? Can I have both running the same version of windows, paralells for work, boot camp for play?
Find Apple's detailed instructions here Currently, no, but this request has been made and the Parallels team has indicated that they are exploring the possibility of this idea for future releases.
Actually, I think you can run both...one for work and one for play...but just not at the same time. At boot time, you can select the bootcamp Windows machine and play your games. When it is time to work, you can reboot in Mac mode and run your Windows programs that are supported by parallels, as well as all your Mac programs. The only tricky part is that you will have to install Windows twice. (Once in bootcamp, and once in parallels.) You should not have to buy two copies of Windows to do this, but you may have to call microsoft at some point in the second installation and explain that you are re-installing windows on the same machine. You will need to have enough disk space for two installations of Windows. And the two installations of Windows will not know about each other, i.e. cannot share files, programs, and the like.
