Boot Camp & Parrallels

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Level 1

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Boot Camp & Parrallels

Hello,

I recently bought a 13" macbook pro (late 2011).

I just installed Windows 7 using bootcamp. I installed Windows 7 because I have Office 2010 Pro plus (the one with sharepoint). I also plan on installing Starwars old republic, Star Trek online, and Steam.

I will be using bootcamp when playing the games. I was thinking of maybe using Parrallels when I'm on the mac side and just want to use Office.

Do you think it would be a good idea to buy Parrallels for those reasons or just stick with bootcamp and have to shutdown and switch over.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Mar 25, 2012 5:22 AM

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Answer 1

Shootist007

Level 6

16,703 points

Mar 25, 2012 5:53 AM in response to rvicente80

I've never used Parallels, I use VMware Fusion, but from what I read you can use the boot camp install of Win 7 in a Parallels VM so it may work fine for just Office.

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Answer 2

First Magus

Level 7

21,278 points

Mar 25, 2012 6:02 AM in response to rvicente80

Welcome to the forums.

I have used both Parallels and VMware Fusion. I prefer VMware but it is all subjective. You might want to download the trial version of each and see which one you prefer.

For SWTOR you need to run it in bootcamp. It works great there but lags a little in VMware. Same for Steam and Star Trek. Office works fine in VMware. If I am gaming I stay in bootcamp except for WOW which has a Mac version. Hope this helps.

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Answer 3

cduerr

Level 1

14 points

Mar 25, 2012 7:31 AM in response to rvicente80

I have never used VMWare on Mac, i prefer Parallels. I also don't any first person shooter on the Macbook Pro (2010) with Geforce 330M. But I noticed that the games i play (mainly adventures, but also using 3D) are playing so smoothly from under Parallels that i have never booted the Windows partition using Bootcamp ever since i found out this performance. YMMV.

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Answer 4

Mar 25, 2012 8:56 AM in response to rvicente80

If I were you I would buy one or the other, both do the job well. I use Parallels and run Win 7 and Ubuntu both work well. What I like about the program is that I can run them like a program without having to reboot into Win 7 or Ubuntu. I just open Parallels and run the program while listening to my tunes and doing other things on my Mac. I have never tried Bootcamp so I cannot comment on that end but for me, a virtual machine is the way to go. Plus you could try Oracles, VirtualBox, which is free.

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Answer 5

Mar 25, 2012 9:49 AM in response to franzenkris

VirtualBox, unlike Parallels or Fusion, can not use the OP's Boot Camp installation of Windows as the guest operating system.

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Answer 6

ds store

Level 7

30,745 points

Mar 25, 2012 10:17 AM in response to rvicente80

rvicente80 wrote:

Do you think it would be a good idea to buy Parallels for those reasons or just stick with bootcamp and have to shutdown and switch over.

Install Parallels and have it image the Bootcamp Windows to use in OS X and then run all your non-3D games/heavy CPU uses there in OS X.

If one has a powerful machine, good video card, good amount of RAM and a lightweight OpenGL 3D game, it can run +50 fps in a virtual machine in OS X, I have done it with Cube2 and Nexius Classic.

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