• Mac Parallels Reviews
• Windows For Mac Parallels
• Mac Boot Camp

By default, both Parallels and VMware run their VMs in a window - so you get a kind of 'Windows window' that displays the Windows desktop floating in its own window on top of the Mac desktop. Parallels Desktop is the best way to run Windows on your Mac. It offers lots of flexibility when it comes to which operating systems it can run and it offers a customizable experience to make it your own.

Mac Parallels Reviews

Click to expand.Boot Camp is 100% free. It comes pre-loaded as part of OS X's base software installations and the only 'cost' is Windows itself. With Parallel's, you pay $80 on top of the cost of Windows itself.

But the cons don't end there: 1) Decreased performance: You have to 'allocate' processing cores and memory specifically to Parallel's that comes out of what's available for OSX. Meaning, you tell OSX to give your Windows 1-4 GB of ram and whatever's left over is needed for OSX to continue in the background. You also tell it how many cores to use.

2) Significantly less GPU power: Parallel's runs GPU emulation drivers to 'simulate' a dedicated GPU for Windows which further cuts your performance down. You essentially get a 50% Windows PC and whatever GPU it is emulating is also 50%. The advantages: It runs in OSX. You simply press certain hotkeys and you can switch back to OSX in mere seconds. You can save state on the machine and quickly pause it to gain back resources for OSX. Because it's virtual, you can easily manipulate the virtual hard drive space for it to give yourself more space on the fly. However, Parallel's is MOSTLY for people who need to run non-graphics intensive software such as Windows exclusive production software or maybe AutoCAD or MATLab or ChemDraw or other science software that is Windows exclusive.

Parallel's WAS NOT designed with gamers in mind. The advantages of Boot Camp: 1) 100% hardware support. You're essentially booting into a Windows computer when you use boot camp and gaming performance, Windows performance is stellar.

It's in some cases better than Windows performance on a Windows computer. 2) It's free.

Windows For Mac Parallels

Boot Camp is free with OSX, you just need to 'buy' Windows 7 or Windows 8. Parallel's costs money. 3) It uses all the hardware toward Windows. You don't lose performance by having a separate partition. 4) You can see your OSX files.

It automatically loads your Mac hard drive as a secondary drive in Windows so you can view videos, documents and downloads from OSX on Windows as long as the file extensions are compatible (most times they are). The disadvantages: You have to shut down/restart and completely exit OSX. You lose hard drive space. You have to repartition your drive for Windows and the partition sizes, in most cases, are semi-permanent. Wireless touchpad keyboard for mac. Efilm download for mac. While you can repartition, the last time I tried I 100% lost my Windows partition and all my games and had to reinstall.

Mac Boot Camp

You only have 256GB of SSD space. I would recommend having an external hard drive that you use for Boot Camp and reserve all that glorious good SSD space for good old OSX. Cost wise, Bootcamp is free, so you just need a windows license.