AP

My trusty Dell inspirion finally met a violent end last night after my daughter poured my beer over it
Anyway after getting launched against the wall the impact maintenance that I have relied upon for so many years finally let me down.
Out with the shiny Macbook pro which does everything I want to except run a couple of windows programs that I have to have.
Question is do I use boot camp and put a version of windows 7 on it or should I install a secondary platform like parallels that will run a virtual windows platform to run from.
I have no experience of either
Cheers
AP

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160bhp 4EAT Outback.....

link1896

I have run VMware fusion3 with xp and 7 on a few MacBooks and liked it more then parallels. I recommend you run a virtualised windows and a boot camp and then evaluate. I had two xp installations as I could never keep the wga ( windows genuine advantage ) happy from one install i tried running in vmware and then natively booting into and so had to run two discrete xp installations. Never save your data to the virtualised hard disc, suffer from a corrupt vm ware data file and its all over.

forester06x

My dad ran Windows XP through VMWare Fusion on his 1st gen Macbook Air (which has 60gb SSD) for awhile, and it worked fine. Beware, it makes your computer horribly slow, or at least it did to the old Macbook Air. Then again the old Airs had a slow processor and only 2gb RAM, which is definitely not enough for Win7. The new Macbook pros should handle it fine. I would go at least 6gb RAM and solid state drive on the memory if it's in the money cards, but the SSD options are very expensive, just like everything else Apple sells.

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'06 FXB AWP- The GolfBall

abn4

I used Bootcamp and it seemed to work fine. Make sure when you partition the drive that you ensure you will have enough room for the programs and to save stuff.

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2011 Forester XT Touring 4EAT Marine Blue Pearl

RadcomTxx

The thing to remember is VMWare or Parallels has to share laptop resources, typical half the processor cores and ram is shared with running the virutal OS. Neither system will run great unless you have sufficient resources to spare.

Bootcamp will act just like a normal windows laptop when you boot into it with no resource loss associated with virtualization.

It really depends on what the software needs and how well you need it to run on what option to use.

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2010 Satin White Pearl FXT Limited
Mod Journal

AP

Thread Starter

Hmmm have some thinking to do then...


Sent from my laptop using a keyboard

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160bhp 4EAT Outback.....

Loscaldazar

Go for bootcamp. Even with a 2.4Ghz quad core Intel i7 processor, 8 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM, and over a gigabit of video processing (that is a fair bit of power I have there, if you aren't into the computer lingo), Parallels and Fusion both run slowly.

Bootcamp avoids the CPU drain altogether.

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2003 Forester 2.5XS Mod Journal

AP

Thread Starter

Yeah I know it's a powerful machine and I am quite computer savvy, just wanted the best solution as I have a lot of bought and paid for windows software but wasn't quite sure of the right route for a MacBook..


Sent from my laptop using a keyboard

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160bhp 4EAT Outback.....