Briefly About the Show

 Since the new Intel Macs have hit the market, two new products have started changing the landscape of Mac computing as we know it. Never before have Mac users been able to dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine - Boot Camp now allows you to do this with relative ease.

On the flip-side, Virtual PC and Guest PC were past solutions to installing and running Windows on your Mac as a virtual install. These virtual solutions weren't very speedy because Windows instructions had to be virtually translated to run on PowerPC chips. This caused huge performance hits, making this solution less than ideal for serious users.

Since OS X now runs natively on Intel x86 chips, the performance hit suffered when running Windows as a virtual OS is much less significant and new software from a company called Parallels is both cheap and fast.

So the question remains; "If I want to run Windows on my Mac, which solution is best for me? Dual-booting using Boot Camp or a virtual install via Parallels?"

While there are no absolute answers, there are some guidelines that might help you to make such a decision.

Reasons to choose Boot Camp:

• If you want to run games in Windows with no performance issues - good for gaming or other apps that need direct access to hardware.
• You need to run Windows natively and want to ensure all USB/Firewire peripherals and other hardware functions without issue.
• You don't mind having to reboot every time you want to do something in the other OS

Reasons to choose Parallels:

• If all you need to do is run Windows to test how your site looks on IE.
• You want to be able to switch to a Windows environment with a single click and no waiting.
• You don't mind issues with some hardware, including USB devices and a performance slow-down when in Windows

These aren't complete lists - in fact they're just off the top of my head, but I think they give a pretty good indication of the pros/cons of making your decision. Something else worth mentioning is that Parallels costs $39.95 and Boot Camp is free. Both products are currently in some form of Beta and not available as final releases.

If you have anything to add, please post a comment. I'm sure I missed something.