“Part of the reason many people own an Intel-based Mac is because of the possibility of running Windows. If you are like most, you are looking to understand the differences between Apple’s Boot Camp, VMware Fusion, and Parallels Desktop,” Neil Ticktin reports for MacTech.
MacDailyNews Take: Define “many.”
Ticktin continues, “Boot Camp, as you probably know, allows you to run Windows natively on your Intel Mac. Here, Mac OS X is nowhere to be seen, and if you want to switch back and forth, you have to reboot the machine. As we’ve seen from some of the recent reports, a Mac can run Windows faster than a native PC machine, and it’s a nice solution. That said, you probably bought a Mac to run Mac OS X a good chunk of time, and that’s where virtualization comes in.”
“Virtualization technology has been around since the 1960s. In general, it refers to the abstraction of computer resources. In our case, we’re talking about the ability to run Windows on a Mac at the same time that you are running Mac OS X,” Ticktin reports.
“So, which solution do you go with? Does virtualization work well? Which virtualization product is faster? Should I run XP or Vista? In short, there are different answers for different people. It all depends on what your needs are,” Ticktin reports.
“To tackle this problem, MacTech undertook a huge benchmarking project starting in September. The goal was to see how Boot Camp, VMware Fusion, and Parallels performed on different levels of Mac hardware, covering both Windows XP and Vista, and comparing that to a baseline PC running Windows,” Ticktin reports.
“Boot Camp, VMware Fusion and Parallels are all very good, each in their own way. You should make your decisions based on what your needs are as a result,” Ticktin reports.
What MacTech found:
• If you don’t want Mac integration, and just want to run Windows, go with Boot Camp. It’s faster than a PC anyway.
• If you want a virtualization product (that allows you to run Windows alongside Mac OS X), and you want the best performance for the types of things that we tested, then clearly you need to run XP and not Vista. Furthermore, in our tests, both VMware Fusion and Parallels performed well, and were a good user experience. That said, Parallels was somewhat faster in general than VMware Fusion for XP.
• If you want the best virtualization performance for Vista, then VMware Fusion is your choice.
Full comprehensive benchmarks and explanations in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Too Hot!” for the heads up.]