Thurrott: Parallels OK for occasional Windows use, otherwise Boot Camp is absolutely the way to go

20 years ago

“Most of the people now falling over themselves to praise Parallels have only used Microsoft’s anemic Virtual PC solution, which ran horribly slowly on PowerPC-based Macs. I’ve been using virtualization software for the PC for several years, and I’ve got VMWare Workstation, Virtual PC, and Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed on various machines here in my cluttered office. None of these solutions are perfect, and all come with various performance issues. Thus, I was curious to see whether Parallels lives up to the speed claims I’d read online,” Paul Thurrott writes for Internet Nexus.

“The truth is, it doesn’t,” Thurrott writes. “Parallels is still virtual machine technology, and that means it runs more slowly than a real PC. It also exhibits the tell-tale signs of virtualization that betray what’s really going on under the hood, even when running in full-screen mode: The mouse cursor tends to lag behind your actual movements somewhat, resulting in a vaguely disconcerting pointing experience that is suspiciously similar to that of a badly-tuned Tablet PC stylus. (Update: The mouse vagueness is partially removed by installing the bundled Parallels Tools. It’s still horrible when you drag and drop anything.)”

Thurrott writes, “That said, Parallels does perform very well for what it is, about on par with what I experience on the PC with VMWare or Virtual Server. That this is a 1.0 product is astonishing. VMWare and Microsoft/Connectix have had years to refine their offerings. For those who just need occasional Windows application compatibility, Parallels is an excellent solution, no doubt about it. But if you want to run Windows regularly, Boot Camp is absolutely the way to go. The experiences are night and day: With Boot Camp, you’re running Windows XP just like you would on a real PC. With Parallels, it’s clearly a virtual machine.”

More in the full article here.

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