The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
I am not sure about VMware but I can confirm that Parallels will boot a Windows boot camp partition. I used to do that instead of relying on just the virtual machine installation. I eventually took the boot camp partition off and went full on virtual machine as I was tired of having empty space reserved for Windows that I would never fill.
Personally, I prefer Parallels. I think the company behind it tends to push out more updates and you can find it for a pretty reasonable price. The bookstore for my university was selling it for $40 on a USB thumb drive. I tried VMware but I didn't care for the way it operated. The only thing I didn't like about Parallels was that it wanted to integrate Windows (and the start bar) into OS X. I prefer the keep the two completely separate so I had to change a few settings. Other than that, Parallels has been able to provide solid performance giving me no need to have a boot camp partition.
I tried paralles but didnt like it. I used to reboot to windows to program so I thought it would work out great because the application can use the same install. when i logged in and it was pretty cool how i didnt have to reboot. however compiling and such was aweful slow. in fact pretty much everything was slow. I did dedicate a good amount of memory to it also since my machine had 8 gigs and it didnt help.
Its neat what it does but booting to actual windows on a bootcamp partition takes 25 seconds and is 1000000x better.
Both VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop support using Bootcamp.
Install Windows using Bootcamp but do NOT activate it. Parallels and VMWare will have an option to start up a Bootcamp partition, which you can do. Once its up and running in the VM, activate it there, and it will fix the activation so it will work fine in both Bootcamp and the virtual machine.
I'm using the latest version, which is supposedly faster than previous versions, and running a boot camp installation of Windows rather than a virtual disk installation. Except for games, I barely notice any speed difference between running the same boot camp installation under Parallels vs. running it natively. If you haven't tried the latest version, consider giving it another chance.
For Windows: Parallels and VMWare Fusion can use a boot camp installation while Virtual Box can not, and they're also somewhat faster and easier to set up. Virtual Box is supposedly better than Parallels for running Linux though.
Yes. You can move the end of the partition (expanding or shrinking) using the Windows disk management tool. If you need to move the start of the partition, e.g. to expand or shrink the OS X volume, then use Camp Tune ($20).
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
