[X4U] Parallels vs. Windows

[Jon Marett]

On Nov 18, 2006, at 6:54 AM, Jim Robertson wrote:

> Have others heard/read/divined that Parallels will be tweaked to  
> capture an
> already-installed Boot Camp Windows XP partition?

Not sure if Parallels will add such a feature, but this thread  
discusses the process of converting a Boot Camp partition to a  
Parallels vm:

<http://forum.parallels.com/thread3261.html>

I have an early beta of VMware Fusion which shows lots of promise,  
but it is too early to tell if performance will beat that of  
Parallels and rival that of a Boot Camp install. I'm already  
impressed with the features that work already (drag and drop between  
the host and vm, multi-processor support for vm, solid USB support  
including the built-in iSight in my macbook). Even simple things like  
resizing the vm window are pretty slick. The public beta should be  
available by the end of the year, and should have an even better  
feature set and be more stable than this beta.

VMware and a few 3rd party vendors also have P2V products for other  
platforms, so we can hope it will become a reality for us mac users.  
Otherwise a Boot Camp install might be converted using these tools on  
another platform to convert the partition to a vm, which then can be  
transfered back to the Mac. Of course you would need another machine  
running VMware Server (a free product that runs on Windows and  
Linux), and the software to do the P2V conversion (not sure if any of  
these are free).

jon

________________________
"Content makes poor men rich; discontentment makes rich men poor."
-Benjamin Franklin