Whats the best way to run windows 7 Pro on a Mac?

[Skillachi]

Hey guys am planning on purchasing a Mac but I wanna know whats the best way to run windows 7 Pro, Quickbooks and Word 2007 on a mac, what do you think? Using Parallels Desktop 8 or Bootcamp?

 

[SAG]

Bootcamp uses native hardware, you'll get your best performance.
And to me, Virtualbox runs much better than Parallells when virtualizing.

I'm happy with Virtualbox running Win7 on my iMac when I need it.

 

[altrenda]

It depends on how you want to work.

Bootcamp gives all of the machines resources to Windows, resulting in a high end experience. The downside is you have to boot into whichever environment you want to run, OS X or Windows.

Using VMWare Fusion, Paralells, or Virtualbox, you can run both OS's simultaneously. Because you are sharing reources, you should max out the RAM so that each OS has sufficient memmory to run well. Fusion and Paralells seem to leapfrog each other in performance with each release. I haven't used Virtualbox in awhile, but it was a bit harder to configure and slower than the others. Fusion and Paralells are built for just this purpose with lots of support, which is important for my business customers. For whatever reason, customers that ask for it seem to ask for Paralells more than Fusion.

Cost is another issue. After buying the Mac, you need to buy a licensed version of Win 7. Bootcamp is free. If you go the virtualization route, Virtualbox is free but you need to buy VMWare Fusion or Paralells.

Almost half the Macs we set up run Windows as well. As I said, mostly we have been using Paralells, but we have lots of Fusion installs as well.

 

[Skillachi]

Am gonna go with parallels desktop, I think it will get the job done. Plus there is tons of support if need. They got tutorials on there site as well so I'll give it a shot. Thanks once again guys.

 

[acscva]

I have been running Parallels for a couple of years and it has been great. I bought the macbook to learn but didn't want to lose the capability for running windows apps as well.

I think it is a good choice over bootcamp and the others listed.

 

[Skillachi]

I have been running Parallels for a couple of years and it has been great. I bought the macbook to learn but didn't want to lose the capability for running windows apps as well.

I think it is a good choice over bootcamp and the others listed.

Thanks acscva, I appreciate your response...

 

[ajgyomber]

It is very difficult to resize a Boot Camp partition in the event you run out of space. I've used Paragon's Camptune X and it worked well in case you every need it.

--AJ

 

[Skillachi]

It is very difficult to resize a Boot Camp partition in the event you run out of space. I've used Paragon's Camptune X and it worked well in case you every need it.

--AJ

Thanks a lot for the warning really appreciate it.