How many actually have an activated & working Windows 10 Boot Camp partition as a Parallels VM?

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I was able to get this working, eventually. On two Macs in fact, one at work and one for personal use. It absolutely is a massive pain to get Windows - the same installation of Windows - activated both under boot camp and Parallels. First of all, neither copy can use an OEM key. That was my IT guy's fault and wasted about an entire day of me getting nowhere.

Now, assuming it is an off the shelf copy, what I did was activate the Parallels boot first, then rebooted into Boot Camp. When I tried to activate it there it freaked the F out about me changing the hardware, and I suppose to Windows it looks like a massive hardware change compared to what's needed to run in Parallels. I was able to - eventually - get the 11,000 digit code needed to properly activate it due to a hardware change. SAVE THIS CODE

Then, believe it or not (believe it) I rebooted to the Mac and Parallels, and then it freaked out and asked me to activate. Again. (This is the third time for the same copy of Windows.) Luckily I could short circuit the phone call this time because "all" you need to do is enter the same 11,000 digit code you got above.

The first time I dealt with this it was entirely over the phone, the next time (just a couple months ago) they thankfully allowed me to do it via a web site.

The other problems - drivers going missing or needing to be updated, Boot Camp control panel breaking, the track pad no longer working in Windows, among other issues, came and went and were entirely different on my MacBook Pro vs. my iMac. But after enough practice I could get them working pretty quickly after I changed, and sometimes I didn't need to do anything.

My theory is that Windows Updates occasionally broke the other version than the one I was running when I performed an update. I eventually stopped using the native Boot Camp and have since deleted the partition and moved exclusively to pvm files which - oddly - have better disk performance than when running on a native NTFS partition (I tested this many times, I was so confused).

Most of this I blame on Windows, a little bit on the way Apple handles Boot Camp (but at the same time they didn't need to at all and it's nice that it's an option).

 

May I ask how you were able to get the Boot Camp control panel to show up in the notification area? The Boot Camp control panel shows up in the (slowly becoming deprecated) control panel and I can access all of it's functionality there, but it sure was much nicer to have it in the notification area so I could more easily access it.

 

See this thread: https://forum.parallels.com/threads...mackbook-pro-hotkey-wont-work-anymore.348884/
look for the registry edit. Worked for me.