Any reason to stay away from VM?

[SuperMiguel]

Im using a mac, i was thinking to install windows 7, using bootcamp, but just wondering if there is a reason to use bootcamp instead of making a VM? using parallels or vmware?

[PeterG]

When i had a Mac, i was using Win7 on VirtualBox for my dev applications. Worked very well.

Just my 2 Cents

Regards

[AntiProtonBoy]

Any reason to stay away from VM?

Slow(er) performance, if that matters to you. For example, if you play games, you really want a dual boot setup.

[PeterG]

Win7 works very well on a VM , you just have to allocate 2 or more cores to get nice performance. I gave win7 2 cores on my Macbook pro and it ran like a dream. I didn't play games on it, I tend to use the Xbox for games.

It costs nothing to test it on your Mac anyway VirtualBox is free.

Regards

[metalphreak]

I think VMWare used to let you boot up your bootcamp partition as a virtual machine as well while in OSX.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014618

[ejeffrey]

Windows runs as well and sometimes better on a VM than real hardware.  Gaming still prefers or requires native hardware, but for almost everything else, including many CAD applications a VM is the way to go.

Just make sure you have enough hardware on the host, particularly memory.  Assigning a second CPU core to the guest as PeterG suggests won't go wrong either.

[SuperMiguel]

My lappy is a i5 4gb of ram and 256 ssd can't upgrade it anymore

I used virtualbox on the pass both the interaction with osx is not that good. I'm using parallels right now and works good I guess...

Also I'm using windows xp on that vm thinking about putting 7 on it since few report show that it runs faster on vm

[PeterG]

My laptop is an i3 4GB and i run Virtualbox without issue.
Xubuntu and Win7 run well with 2 cores and 2GB ram.

Regards

[LuckyJaker]

I use parallels on my MBP 17, very satisfied