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surferboy · Jul 8, 2006, 10:13 AM

I have been surfing the forums to get a general consensus on how well parallels runs Win XP on an Intel Mac. I am on the verge of an upgrade to an Intel Mac of some sort, and I am trying to decide where to invest my time: setting up parallels or testing out Boot Camp Beta

I realize that performance depends on what you are using, but I wanted to start a thread to establish a general consensus on XP performance on an Intel Mac. I am not using it for games.

I'd love to hear your overall thoughts, including benchmarks, sense of speed, limitations, etc. How does it compare to running XP on a PC? Is it comparable to a mid-level PC?

I know a lot of this information can be culled from the forums, but I'd love to establish a consensus here.

Thanks

Hi I'm Ben · Jul 8, 2006, 10:59 AM

I think parallels is great. I don't do much in it though. I was using it for IE6 web testing and I played Age of Empires 2. Both ran great like it was native.

Parallels is really a joy to use since I refuse to boot into windows when I want to run bootcamp. I also have no desire to partition my drive

surferboy · Jul 8, 2006, 01:01 PM

Love your website. Is it iWeb? How does the speed in parallels feel? Native? Near native?

thanks

EasyMac · Jul 9, 2006, 03:43 PM

Just about. Parallels uses one of your cores from your processor. But I heard it also only uses 8MB of VRAM?

ilovetrucks · Jul 9, 2006, 06:46 PM

I've been a hardcore PC guy for years, but a buddy of mine talked me into trying a MacBook 2.0 with 2gigs of ram and I put in a 100gig 7200 rpm drive. Parallels has been working great, I allocated 1.3gigs or ram to the application and have been quite surprised with the good performance. I run a very processor intense client-server app and have not been disappointed. My only disappointment is I e-mailed parallels some technical questions and never heard back.

-Q- · Jul 10, 2006, 03:41 PM

For everything I've used it for (Intermittent office stuff, IE 6&7, and a proprietary DB app) it has been outstanding. One thing I forgot to do when I first installed it was to install the Parallels Tools for the Windows VM. It made mouse responsiveness much better for me. And that's really the worst thing I have to say about Parallels. Really solid app.

surferboy · Jul 10, 2006, 04:30 PM

I might be using it for office apps, articulate presenter, etc. Anyone use these?

ilovetrucks · Jul 12, 2006, 05:59 PM

Originally Posted by surferboy

I might be using it for office apps, articulate presenter, etc. Anyone use these?

I run MS Office all the time (Outlook, Word, Excel) no issues what so ever very responsive.

n8236 · Jul 13, 2006, 12:19 AM

I just installed a copy of Parallels on my cousin's MBP w/ 1.5gb of ram and it works fine. She had me install for her just so she can use MSN Live Messenger 8.0 and see her friend's comments and blogs.

A slight hi-jack here, I have bootcamp installed and attempted to install Parallels, but had no success doing so. I can install both Para and Boot, yes? I can get Para to boot off the XP cd and all, but the installation gets all whacky once the files are finished copy and just keeps installing from the xp w/o actually booting into windows.