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Running Mac + Windows in Parallel?

Every time I ask a PC audio or video question, there seems to be a chorus of fans suggesting I switch to Mac.

I would potentially be interested in doing this for my personal stuff, but its seems a bit of a pain given that all of my work lives in a windows envronment.

I heard recently, however, that Apple may be responding to users like me in that the new machines will run both windows and Mac? Simultaneously?

Does anyone have any experience with this? That might be the ideal solution for me, as even if Mac does run Office etc, I dont really feel like spending money for the Mac compatible software that I already have.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
cwlondon
vegasears
922 posts
 
I seem to remember during the install Parallels asked how much RAM memory I wanted to allocate. My Parallels partition is set at 256 mb. My MAC only has 1 gig of ram.
cwlondon OP
1,198 posts
 
Well can we load up on additional RAM for this?
tvad
9,467 posts
 
The MacBook Pro can be loaded with up to 3 gigs of RAM. The MacBook can be loaded with up to 2 gigs of RAM.
jimtyrro
23 posts
 
I have a MacBook Pro w/Parallels on it and it's working great. I'm a professional web designer, so I needed this flexibility to run both Mac and Windows at the same time, in fact, right now I have OSX, Windows XP and Linux (Fedora 6) running simultaneously. I can switch between them with a single mouse click.

You can allocate as much memory to the 'guest OS' as you like, but there are some limitations, to make sure that the primary OS - OXS can operate smoothly. I have 3 GB of memory, so I allocated 1.5GB to OSX and 1.5Gb to Win XP. I run XP from an external eSATA hard drive, so the speed is great.

It runs very fast, if I didn't know it was a VM (virtual machine), I'd say it runs faster than my native Win XP. The only device that's not working inside Windows (there's still no driver for it) is a built-in iSight camera.

Let me know if you have any other questions and I'll try to answer them.
cwlondon OP
1,198 posts
 
Jimtyrro

Re "It runs very fast, if I didn't know it was a VM (virtual machine), I'd say it runs faster than my native Win XP."

This sounds like it might just be what the doctor ordered....

At a glance, the specs look pretty similar on the lowest to highest priced MacBook Pro.

Can I safely conclude that the main difference is screen size?

As I use an external monitor, can I save the money and recycle the savings into maximum RAM?
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