This may cause offence/apoplexy to the faithful!


I have a friend who has just bought a macbook pro. Now she's asking about dual booting with Win7 - mainly for games, not the graphics intensive stuff, just puzzle/sudoku/similar.
. She is actually fairly savvy, and thinking about parallels, for the speed of switching, compared with bootcamp. Is there much of a performance hit?

I don't notice much of a performance hit using Parallels + XP + Mac Pro, however I have had issues with installing just XP on the Pro under Boot Camp...

IMO, virtualisation is the way to go.

I wouldn't have thought for that type of puzzle game that blazing speed would be all that essential, so virtualisation via Parallels should be absolutely fine, and far more convenient that restarting via Boot Camp.

In my experience, running Windows under Boot Camp (at least on Macbooks) is slow and horrible.

Having a PPC Mac I can't comment on virtualisation or otherwise but I find it somewhat difficult to believe that there aren't any Suduko/puzzle type games out there that run natively on the Mac. They'd certainly be cheaper than buying a copy of Windows 7 (unless you already have it of course).

She tends to use big fish games a lot, and either doesn't want to download/buy them all again, or some such. Not really sure exactly what the problem is, not had the time to go into it. With her I find it easier sometimes to go along with it and just nudge in the right direction where I can.

Oh God yes...

Looks like either will work, so I'll let her get on with it, probably go with the paralells route.

Thanks all.

Don't forget there's also VMware Fusion as well as Parallels. There's also a freeware one but the name escapes me at the moment.

EDIT: I think the free one is VirtualBox - though it's not as feature-packed as the other two options.

While it might not be as feature-packed, any option that VirtualBox doesn't have I haven't found the need for in Parallels...
Parallels feels a bit more Macish, but VirtualBox is a great package for the price of free...

Also it's worth pointing out that both Parallels and Fusion (I'm not sure about Virtualbox) will allow you to create a VM from a bootcamp partition - giving the option of either native booting or virtualisation from a single Windows installation.