I just bought a MacBook Pro 13in i5 with 8GB memory and 500gb hard drive. I want to get parallels 7 so I can be able to use windows media player and ms office. I was wondering if parallel would give me problems on speed of dvd/downloaded movies/songs etc. I do not play games so boot camp will be annoying to reboot every time i want to watch a movie or use office. The reason why I want to use WMP is because Quick does not have a playlist I can put episodes of movies onto a list. I tried Divx and it's not all that great. I keep having to go to the next track. I wish to have it go to the next track without my input. If there's another way that doesn't require parallel for me to have a playlist then that'll be great. So far, iTunes does not support avi files that I know of. I heard it's possible to have both worlds. Can I install parallel first then boot camp or must it be boot camp first? Thanks.
If you're going to use Parallels I don't recommend using Boot Camp unless you have plenty of memory that you don't need. I have a Mac Air where SSD memory is not as much as a regular laptop. When you assign a certain amount of memory to Boot Camp you can't change it without deleting everything and starting all over again. I learned the hard way. If you assign too much memory then you just took it away from the Mac OS side and if you don't use it it's wasted memory. If you assign too little memory then you end up not having enough when you want to install something else in Windows. I went with Parallels because now I can keep adding programs in Windows or Mac OS and the entire drive is available for both sides.
