I do GIS development with ArcGIS and have a MacBook with 2GB of RAM on the way to enable me to bring my windows-only gis stuff and my mac stuff (everything else computer related) together onto one machine. I have played with ArcGIS on my girlfriend's MacBook under Parallels and it runs really nicely. My question is basically how much faster will things be in BootCamp vs. Parallels. How reliable/useable is using bootcamp as a VM? I would be using ntfs, as if I wanted to access the files on the partition from OSX, I could use parallels, and it seems to be better supported by parallels. Is it worth it to dedicate a partition to windows, or is the difference in performance so small that I would never see the need to use boot camp? I should note that 3d acceleration does not have a significant impact on the work I would be doing in Windows.
i have noticed a pretty significant performance boost from running my boot camp partition as a parallels vm vs. running a entirely virtualized vm from a .hdd file. The largest performance increases are in file access. Visual Studio runs much better on the real partition than on the .hdd. Your mileage may vary, of course.
