I want to get the best performance I can for playing games on my windows installation, and I was wondering if it is possible to boot into the virtual machine when you turn on the computer so that the mac side will not be taking up any of the system resources. If this is not possible, how would I get the best performance out of the virtual machine?
that's what BootCamp is for - you create a separate partition on your hard drive, install Windows there, and then you can select at startup whether you want to run Windows or Max OS X on your machine. But you won't have any interconnectivity (no copy-paste between os x and windows, or shared folders, etc.) I read elsewhere on the web that the Parallels VM is rather close in speed to running Windows from a BootCamp partition.
I was asking because my internal hard drive died and I run OS X from an external drive and unfortunately, BootCamp doesn't let you install windows on an external drive.
