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Are Paralells and Bootcamp Compatible?
- Thread starter BiikeMike
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Short answer, no.
Long answer, Parallels is a virtual machine, emulating a certain set of hardware. It has a virtual hard drive from which it boots the OS you have installed. This virtual hard drive is a file with the extension .hdd and there is no way to make your Boot Camp windows partition look like a .hdd file.
When you have it installed, you should be able to map partitions, including the Boot Camp partition, but you still need two separate Windows installs. I'm not sure of the legality of using the same license key on each. I would have said no, but one of the editors on MacWorld apparently got the same license working after phoning Microsoft and telling the customer rep that the second install was in a virtual machine.
Long answer, Parallels is a virtual machine, emulating a certain set of hardware. It has a virtual hard drive from which it boots the OS you have installed. This virtual hard drive is a file with the extension .hdd and there is no way to make your Boot Camp windows partition look like a .hdd file.
When you have it installed, you should be able to map partitions, including the Boot Camp partition, but you still need two separate Windows installs. I'm not sure of the legality of using the same license key on each. I would have said no, but one of the editors on MacWorld apparently got the same license working after phoning Microsoft and telling the customer rep that the second install was in a virtual machine.
i don't really know the details, but to the average user, yes, it is "like" VPC in that it allows you to run a different OS without rebooting, but it is unlike VPC in that it's not emulating an Intel chip on a PPC computer and it uses the built-in virtualization functionality of the Intel Core Duos. This gives you a much faster running PC. It's been benchmarked as being equivalent to 80-90% of the speed of a single core version of the dual core CPU in the Mac - for instance it's roughly equivalent to a 1.6GHz Pentium M on my 17" iMac. However, it doesn't have any 3D graphics support so if you want it for games, you're out of luck. The only game I got running on it was Civ II.
And yes, you will give up another humungous amount of GB to Windows if you use it. And you need more than 5GB for a usable Windows install.
And yes, you will give up another humungous amount of GB to Windows if you use it. And you need more than 5GB for a usable Windows install.