Launched a year before Apple added Boot Camp onto its desktop operating system, Parallels Desktop is o ne of the top paid virtual machines available for both regular and power users. This could easily become a hassle over time but considering that Boot Camp is available for free it is an acceptable compromise. Every time a user wants to use the guest operating system for whatever, a full reboot is required. Maybe the biggest downside of all is the reboot process. This means that they will have to figure out how to create a communication channel between the two completely isolated operating systems to allow for file transfers across platforms. Alongside this minimum allocation of 40GB of space, users will only be able to read the Boot Camp partition's content and not write to it. Despite all that they say about the latest release being optimize for the current version of OS X, it runs just fine a version or two behind.The downside of Boot Camp, however, is that users need to allocate storage space on the startup disk for the Windows OS, which will be formatted to NTFS. I tend to upgrade every two years or even three. As for upgrades, I generally do not upgrade every year. As Parallels 10 is nearing an upgrade point (they upgrade it every year with OS X) you can find it in some great value bundles where you can get Parallels 10 and a bunch of other apps for $50 or less. I tend to run my Parallels sessions as full-screen and then Ctrl-Arrow over to it when it's needed rather than do the "coherence" thing where your Windows apps are commingled with your Mac ones. your Windows session passes through your Mac's networking this is the default setup) connecting to VPN in OS X gives me VPN access in Windows. When travelling I need VPN and by setting up shared networking (i.e. Microsoft CRM and an old site we have that uses DHTML). Internet Explorer for a handful of sites I use that are only compatible with IE (e.g. We haven't set up the Web client yet, so I need the Windows client. Need this for some stuff I'm helping set upĭynamics GP (accounting). I don't run a ton of stuff in Parallels because I have found OS X native equivalents for pretty much everything, from Office to Project to Visio. If you said "yes" to 2 or three of these, it's Parallels for you. Whether Boot Camp or Parallels is the right choice comes down to three questions:Ĭan you do all of your email, browsing, and general work stuff in OS X and just need Windows for extra things?ĭo you want to be able to move quickly back and forth between Windows and Mac?Īre your Windows app requirements NOT graphics intensive (i.e. While my current MBP is top-of-the-line, not so long ago I was running on a MBP purchased 8 years ago. Unless you work for Valve and need to QA games or work for Sony and need to edit video in Windows, Parallels will work perfectly if your Mac is even reasonably current. In an organization of over 3000 employees, I'm one of two with a Mac. I have been using my Macbook in an all-windows workplace for a few years. If Parallels is fast enough for you, it is drastically more convenient than rebooting (it can even make your Windows applications look like they are natively installed in OSX), and the aforementioned setup still doesn't preclude you from booting into Windows from time to time, should you need the extra performance. How heavy duty is the compilation you are doing? I was under the impression that most embedded systems stuff would be pretty light weight, due to memory and storage restrictions, but it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.Įither way, as others here have said, you can boot up a boot camp partition from Parallels, so you might want to just set that sucker up, and then try out Parallels (do they offer any kind of trial/do they have a "return" policy of any kind?). Granted, I do most of my heavy duty development in OSX, but I do some C# stuff in Visual Studio from time to time, and it seems to work just fine. I have a 2014 13" rMBP with an i5 and 8 GB RAM, and Parellels runs beautifully. In principle, 8GB is plenty for virtualization, and Parallels seems to be particularly efficient.
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