BootCamp (was: Re: Creating .icns files on Mac.)

[Bill Marriott]

Hi Richard,

Some great points you raise. I'm not at all against using Parallels/VMWare, 
but I think it's desirable to have a single Windows partition accessible via 
BootCamp. These days, it probably makes sense for the BootCamp partition to 
be Vista.

Here's what I consider to be required reading:

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.24/24.02/VirtualizationBenchmark/

or

http://tinyurl.com/yvfy9k

As you can see, virtual machines actually outperform native Windows XP in 
some circumstances!

As for why I need to boot into "true-blue" Windows, there are some programs 
that don't work right when run under virtualization. One of them is a 
utility I use to use my cell phone as a modem. It's not available for Mac, 
and the virtual machines assume you're going to use the Mac's networking 
hardware, not the virtual machine's.

Having the BootCamp partition on my Mac has saved my hide more than a couple 
times just by virtue of being able to get online when other net connectivity 
was not available. (And EVDO proved to be pretty snappy.)

As the article above shows, the virtual software runs Vista like molasses. 
So speed is a reason to put Vista on BootCamp.

Another reason is games. The VMs do a poor job currently of emulating 
DirectX.

I don't see it as much of a sacrifice to maintain 10GB or 15GB of space for 
BootCamp. It's dual-purposed for the VM software, and it's there when I need 
it. For everything else (Linux), I would use a virtual machine.

Bill