Here is the situation. I'm a Mac-fan who owns mostly Macs, runs my servers on Macs, and so on. However I develop software for Windows Mobile. Its my life and that's not going to change.
So I currently own a PM 2.16Ghz Dell for my development, but I'm really wanting to move to a dual core processor laptop because Visual Studio likes to take up the full CPU when its compiling ARM4 code and Windows is so "wonderful" at multi-tasking that nothing else gets any process time.
The idea of having my Mac fix and my Windows dev at the same time is very appealing. Also I prefer to use Trillian over Adium/iChat and in some cases prefer Outlook over Apple's Mail (depends on the need - when doing a lot of scheduling and certain kinds of email) so I'd prefer to be able to run in Parallels so I can use the best app for my needs from either OS at the same time. Boy would I be in hog heaven then.
But my concern is that disk speed and CPU use will make Visual Studio feel like my PM 2.16 or slower rather than the upgrade I am looking for when running under Parallels. I know BootCamp will run Windows at 100% full speed and I'd get the full benefit, but speed isn't everything.
So...my question. First off - does Parallels use BOTH cores when its active? Second, how well do the Windows Mobile ARM emulators run under Parallels? (yeah...talk about an interesting idea - a VM within a VM). And if anybody has run Visual Studio 2005 under Parallels, how does it compare in compile time to running natively on the hardware?
I know this is a VERY specific question that very few people would know, but on the other hand I've heard a lot of Windows developers who once they heard of BootCamp bought a MBP and are doing this very thing. So I'd love to get their feedback.
I'm not yet sure if I'm going to get one now or wait for Merom, though...I'm thinking Merom which of course will speed a few things up.
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