[dzp111]

...or do most people prefer Bootcamp?

Do both work with Windows 7?

[-Q-]

it really depends on what you want to do/accomplish.

There's also VMWare's Fusion which is a competitor to Parallels that does the same thing (runs Windows inside OS X).

I typically will use Parallels for viewing web sites in IE to confirm they're rendering correctly and other light tasks. If I need to move more quickly, I find booting into windows via Boot Camp seems to be faster. Although it seems the later versions of both Parallels and Fusion have done some good work in speeding up the virtualization.

All three work with Windows 7.

Again, it depends on how you work and what you're trying to do in Windows.

[turtle777]

I run Quicken 2010 on Fusion.

I found that Win XP is actually a bit faster than Win 7 on Fusion, so that's what I use to run Quicken.

On Bootcamp, I have Win 7, which runs nicely. Use it mainly for playing Civilization IV.

-t

[P]

Ars Technica reviewed both options a while back. They seem to prefer Fusion 3.

[Atheist]

MacTech did a head-to-head between Parallels and Fusion recently. I'm a Fusion user myself but was surprised to find that Parallels was faster (sometimes significantly so) in virtually every test they performed.

[ibook_steve]

Originally Posted by dzp111 

...or do most people prefer Bootcamp?

Do both. You can install Windows on a Boot Camp partition and then use that partition as the VM with Parallels or Fusion.

Steve

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by dzp111 

...or do most people prefer Bootcamp?

Do both work with Windows 7?

Well, there's a huge difference between the two - Parallels is a hardware virtualizer, while Boot Camp allows you to install Windows natively on your Mac hardware. If you want or need to work on things that require full access and use of the actual hardware - gaming, for instance, requires CPU and GPU power that you're not going to get from a virtualized environment - then Boot Camp is the way to go.

You can then, as ibook_steve pointed out, boot your Windows partition as a virtual machine from VMWare Fusion or Parallels. If you want to just try Windows, you can also check out Sun VirtualBox, which is a free alternative to both Fusion and Parallels. It's not quite as polished, but it's got the whole free thing working in its favor.

[lpkmckenna]

Mossberg prefers Parallels now: Programs to make your Mac do Windows | CapeCodOnline.com

[cgc]

For simple tasks, yes. Parallels (or VMWare Fusion, which I prefer) is great and very capable/fast.