Optimal Way to Run Vista

[BugsBunny]

Hey all, I just made the leap and got my very first Apple, the new Macbook Pro, higher end 15 inch one (2.4 Ghz, 160 GB @ 5400, etc.), and as a recent convert I very much feel the need to leave the training wheels on and have Vista running on it (don't worry in a few months [weeks? days?] I'm sure I'll be a full convert).

I bought Parallels 3.0, and was curious if someone could sum up the accumulated knowledge on how to run P3.0 / Boot Camp to make it work best.

I don't play heavy games on it, but sometimes for school I run a few specialized programs like statistical software or the like. Nothing TOO grinding though. I think I'd like to set up my MS Office software on the Vista side (it doesn't make sense to buy copies of Office for both Mac and Windows, or is there some way around that if you buy one of the two?).

I'm confident I'll be more comfortable doing my real work (docs, spreadsheets, etc.) on the Vista platform and my everyday life on the Mac platform, so some might say just run Boot Camp, but as a college student my everday life pretty much overlaps, so Parallels is a nice idea.

So the question is if I'm not using real high-power applications on Vista, should I just install it on BootCamp and then be able to run it off of the virtual machine as well, since the problems of slowness running that way won't be such a problem for me? Will that slowness even be noticeable?

Thanks so much to anyone who can offer their two cents (and to everyone else who's made it this far through the post too)!

 

[M@lew]

For Vista, just run Boot Camp. It doesn't matter if you play games or not, Boot Camp is the way to go for Vista.

 

[gnasher729]

For Vista, just run Boot Camp. It doesn't matter if you play games or not, Boot Camp is the way to go for Vista.

Even better, use Windows XP. Windows XP is the best way to run Vista

 

[Bern]

I'm running Vista Home Premium in Bootcamp on my MBP and as a matter of fact have no issues at all. In fact I think it runs better the XP Pro did.

 

[mags631]

I'm running Vista Ultimate through Boot Camp 1.3 on my new MBP 2.4GHz. No major issues, minor annoyances only so far.

However, I have my wife set up with Parallels on our Mac Mini and I have Office 2003 installed on it, which she uses through Coherence mode. It's ok... there are some issues to deal with and Parallels is by no means perfect. Examples: we get the odd crash when browsing foldes within Office; it has hung several times, requiring us to force shutdown the VM and reboot; and most worrisome, we lost a VM image and had to resort to a back up (that I had made, thank god). It is certainly not mission critical software in my opinion.

As a long time Mac fan, but also a long time Windows user, I am beginning to come to the conclusion that it's best to find Mac versions of programs and just use them on the Mac side to avoid the complications and messiness with VM or rebooting over to Bootcamp.

If you run Parallels or VMWare, I recommend going with XP Home to minimize the RAM it uses. You can pick up a cheap OEM copy through Newegg.com or perhaps on ebay.

Cheers!

 

[BugsBunny]

Thanks to the answerers so far!

I sort of already installed Parallels (whoops), but I guess I'll just go ahead and throw Vista onto BootCamp, and just use the Parallels in situations for real short term use.

Is Vista going to be completely useless in Parallels? If I only want to run Word, Excel, and Powerpoint 2007 on my Vista in Parallels, will I then be okay? Also, as a last question (for now!), with no prior experience partitioning a drive, of my 160 GB hard drive, how much should I dedicate to the partition? Because I'm guessing I'll have most of my actual docs and spreadsheets in the folders that you share between systems...

which brings me to a(nother) last question! I know parallels allows for sharing between OS's, but does BootCamp?

 

[grafikat]

Get neo-office, and you won't even need to run windows! (I use it only to test website compatibility)
I'm waiting on Vista for at least a year. I've got xp via parallels

 

[M@lew]

Vista is pretty useless in Parallels. Even for very light things. I tried using VB and that was still laggy. Solitare was even performing really badly!