I use parralels all day at work to use Outlook-Exchange and Office apps I Have a bootcamp partition with Vista (trying it out) but don't really have a need to boot into bootcamp since evrything I need parralels provides (and quite well I may add) Besides the fact that you can boot into bootcamp partition nativley for 3D or I/O suport is there an advantage on ussing Parralels with a bootcamp partition or is it better to just use a HD Image?
Bootcamp partition At present there are still problems with Vista support (VT-x support needs to be turned off for it to work, they are working on it) and activation problems with Office when booting from Parallels and Bootcamp. My advice would be to keep the VISTA bootcamp partition until they fix the virtualisation problems with VISTA. Once that is done then the only other thing bootcamp gives you is full 3D graphics support. That will be coming in a future release but it is not trivial to do so I wouldn't hold my breath just yet.
What I want to know is if there is any advantage of using a Bootcamp partition instead of a Hard DIsk image File if I'm only ussing Windows XP and I don't need to boot into bootcamp? is using a Partition better than using a hard disk image?
The bootcamp partition is fixed in size and the virtual hard disk is variable, so total disk usage may be lower with a virtual HD. In addition, a full backup of your VM is a simple matter of copying a couple of files in the Finder. So for me, the virtual HD is the better choice.
Given your criteria that you are only using Windows XP via Parallels, and don't need bootcamp, then there are no advantages for using a bootcamp partition, only disadvantages. Disadvantages: 1. Slower than a virtual disk to boot 2. Unable to sleep/suspend the VM 3. Inefficient hard drive space utilization I'm sure there are others, but those are the big ones to me.
one problem with doing backups on vm's is that each backup requires gigs of space. if you're using your bootcamp partition, you can run full/differential (or full/incrementals). if you want to backup your vm, you'll run into the same issue as encrypted home directories. the entire sparseimage gets backed up, even if you only modify a single text file. i prefer bootcamp because i need the option to boot into windows directly (very rare though). don
bootcamp If you don't need to have the performance of booting directly to hardware, then I think bootcamp is a disadvantage. with the virtual hard drive, your window install is very portable. this is great for moving to another machine, recovering, backups, etc. with the bootcamp partition, doing full backup/restore becomes more of an issue.
I've got both Parallels (3120) and Boot Camp installed, and when I turn on my computer if I don't hit the Option key first, it always boots into Boot Camp's XP system by default. It used to do it the other way around, and I would prefer the Mac OS to be the default. Anyone know how to change this? I suspect it got switched with an installation of one of the recent Parallels updated builds because I hadn't changed anything in Boot Camp.
atrick: It's a preference in your Mac or XP. In XP, go to the control panel and choose "Startup Disk". Or, in the Mac, go to System Preferences and choose Startup Disk. This will let you set the default partition.
Of course! I can't believe I didn't think of that. I've been around Macs for too many years to not know that! I guess because I never changed the Startup disk to be Windows, I didn't know how it could have gotten changed. Anyway, I've fixed it in the Sys Pref on the Mac side and all is well. Thanks for reminding me about that!
