Today I’m posting a review of the two ways you can put Windows on your Mac, written by special guest columnist Jason. Jason is a professional Mac technician and specializes in networks and media storage. He’s also the proud owner of a new Macbook, and wanted to try out both the Apple Windows dual-boot program, Boot Camp, and the Parallels virtualization software, which allows you to run several additional operating systems from inside OS X. I’m thinking of having Jason do a regular feature, “Ask the Mac Geek,” if there’s enough interest from readers.

After the break, Jason reports on installing and using Boot Camp and Parallels.

Jason: I spent much of this week playing with Windows XP on my new MacBook, indulging in a bit of geeky enthusiasm and figuring out how everything works.

Boot Camp First, I tried Boot Camp. The setup process was very simple and Boot Camp works as advertised (it’s still missing some pretty basic features like trackpad tapping and contextual menus–but then, this is beta software). This incarnation of Windows sports a Mac-like Startup Disk control panel, complete with the Target Disk Mode button, and connected to my encrypted Airport network without a hitch.

But I was eager to try Parallels, because it seemed to offer a much easier way to switch between operating systems.

Parallels Though Parallels choked a couple times during the Windows install, it’s pretty fast in normal use–there’s no noticeable sluggishness browsing the Web in Windows, even when I’m listening to Airtunes, browsing files, and writing emails in OS X. The Mighty Mouse’s (or MacBook trackpad’s) horizontal scroll doesn’t work in Windows, not surprisingly.

One handy feature that I didn’t expect was the ability to put my Mac home directory on the Windows desktop. However, you have to install a suite of integration drivers before shared folders will work. And that’s not all the drivers will do for you. They provide smoother mousing, clipboard anytime sync with Mac, higher resolution, a disk compacting tool, and a high performance network driver.

Pause and Suspend One confusing thing about Parallels’ interface: it has a function called Pause, which keeps it from grabbing CPU, and one called Suspend, which saves the memory map to disk for resuming the session later (kind of like sleep).

Suspending Parallels ties the Mac up noticeably. Right after suspend started, I tried a couple times to open a terminal window. After over a minute and a half, the windows popped up. On the other hand, booting up just takes 20 seconds; shutting Windows down is even quicker. I don’t see the point in suspending unless you keep a lot of things open.

Running strings in Parallels At first I thought I might not want the Parallels virtual disk image in my FileVault home directory, as they’re pretty big files that change often. But, wondering about security, I figured I’d run strings on the .sav and .hdd files and see what I could find out about myself. In notepad, I created a document called verysecret-document.txt. Strings handily retrieved the name, absolute path, and content out of both Parallels data files. Here’s what I did, on a separate page.

There are a few uses that are more apprpriate for Boot Camp than Parallels–I might have to go the Boot Camp route for Microsoft Flight Simulator if Parallels does not provide sufficient hardware access or performance–but otherwise, Parallels offers greater flexibility and storage efficiency.

Here’s Parallels on my Mac: