Parallels on Mac

I need to run some Windows only software on my Macbook Pro so thinking of getting Parallels. Would I also need to buy a copy of Windows OS just to run the software?

Yes.

Not really, you just need an activation code. I just used an old one from a PC at work which was being scrapped. You also need to re-activate office and any other machine locked SW.

Technically that is an illegal copy now since it would’ve been licensed by the OEM for the machine it came with & that license would not be transferable. So you might as well have got it off pirate bay anyway 🙂

Go with VMware View, much better software.

dday – Member

Go with VMware View, much better software.

You mean Fusion, shirley? If so I agree.

Not that I’ve tried Fusion, but they seem much of a muchness according to the reviews in MacUser. Parallels is slightly more expensive and supposedly a little bit quicker..

Parallels does have one annoying bug where it randomly stars using 100% of the CPU and you have to kill it to get it to stop, but I’m sure Fusion has it’s own issues / bugs lurking away…

I use parallels on my MacBook Air. It’s pretty impressive at integrating so you don’t feel like you’re running two O/S environments at once, but it can eat battery (presumably due to the aforementioned core-hogging glitch after a while). I do to learn more about how to optimise it though as it seems to be only using one of the 4 virtual cores on the i7. The other problem is that you remember just how much RAM windows uses 🙁

Used Parallels and Fusion, I liked Fusion better though I can’t quantify that really. Use Vmware stuff all day every day so it’s probably some fuzzy part of me brain telling me to like it more!

You could also Boot Camp if you can be arsed, but any method requires a licence. £37 from software4students if you can fill the criteria somehow (most people can).. if you’re going W7 just buy one and be done with it, MAK activation isn’t going away any time soon.

You could also Boot Camp if you can be arsed, but any method requires a licence

You can create a boot camp partition/install and then point Parallels at it. That way you can either work in Windows via Parallels or boot directly into Windows. There is some debate about whether you in theory then need two windows licences but it seems to work fine.

Parallels integrates really well but can sometimes be a bit slow so if you’re doing extended work in Windows it’s worth booting in directly.

What’s the software?

You can create a boot camp partition/install and then point Parallels at it

Yeah you can do it with Fusion too, but I’ve found it’s a bit fish nor fowl – either I was booting to Windows (Warhammer Online, may it’s buggy Windows only client rest in peace) or running something that worked fine as a VM.
Good option if you need the choice though, and only uses 1 chunk of disk.

You could also try virtualbox – it is free so no harm in trying.

Tried both. Fusion is the better application imo. Use it almost daily for running multiple VM’s on my MBP.

Is Bootcamp an alternative option to run Windows on a mac?