Are there any advantages to installing a Windows 7 guest under Parallels Desktop for Mac from a Boot Camp Win 7 partition? (As opposed to just installing the Win 7 guest as a virtual machine from within Parallels.) For example, speed; backup & maintenance. Of course I do understand that with the Boot Camp method, you can directly boot into Windows without booting into Mac OS X. Any disadvantages? (Aside from what I understand is the current annoyance of having to do a telephone activation of Win 7 for the virtual machine after having activated Win 7 for the Boot Camp partition.) (I was surprised that the user's guide didn't provide any guidance about this - at least none I could find. It seems like an obvious issue.)
The telephone activation is easy, so not a big problem. First, I used my Boot Camp partition with Parallels Desktop, then created a new VM and made a fresh install of W7. There were no speed difference. Then I decided to use it this way. The advantages are, W7 can increase its size without need to change the hard size of its partition, if you decide to replace your hard drive in the future you won't have to think about your Boot Camp partition and also you don't have to a additional backup for your Boot Camp partition because it will be backed up within OS X partition. A disadvantage is may be not being able to boot from Boot Camp partition but after using Parallels, I don't think I would want it to do so anymore.
