Choosing Boot Camp or Parallels

I absolutely love my MacBook Pro, but I had a hard time choosing whether to run Windows under Boot Camp or Parallels. Parallels is certainly a more elegant solution, providing less interruption to your workflow, but there is something to be said for truly booting into another OS versus running an emulator.

I think it all comes down to what you plan to do with Windows. First, if you can manage not to run Windows at all, that's probably the preferred solution. Assuming that Windows is an unavoidable presence, Boot Camp seems best if you're a gamer or wanting to do music production using Cakewalk or another Windows-based DAW; otherwise, run Parallels. My intent was to use Windows primarily for Web development - Flex Builder (coming to Mac soon), ColdFusion (which can run under OS X with some configuration), and Dreamweaver (requires Rosetta emulation for now under OS X), and secondarily to use it to run music applications. Based on these needs, Boot Camp seemed best and has been a great solution.

If I could have done anything differently, I probably would have allotted more disk space to Windows. The Windows partition can be easily resized in Parallels, but in Boot Camp, you've pretty much got to start over by reclaiming the disk space for OS X and then reinstalling Boot Camp.

If going with Boot Camp, another consideration is Windows file system format; NTFS is more secure and would be preferred, but with FAT32, you can easily copy files from OS X to Windows. This point may be made moot by the new Parallels now in beta, which if I understand correctly may provide the best of both worlds by allowing a Boot Camp partition to be booted into from Parallels without a restart.

And as if running Windows on a Macintosh weren't unnatural enough, the new Parallels also features something called "Coherency," which promises to allow Windows apps to be launched straight from the OS X dock and run as if they were OS X applications. Freaky-deaky.

A comprehensive guide to choosing between Boot Camp and Parallels can be found here.