When the first wave of Intel-powered Macs arrived, Apple came up with a nifty application that allows users to install and run Windows OS directly from their Mac hardware: Boot Camp. After this handy program made its way out in the market, a few companies offered other ways to run Windows such as virtual machines. Out of all the virtual OS software in the market, Parallels offered seamless and unrivaled performance in running Windows via Mac. With Apple’s reputation for producing top-notch native software such as Final Cut Pro and GarageBand, and OSX, users are having a hard time choosing whether to go for Apple’s own solution software or a third-party equivalent. By testing these pieces of software vis-à-vis, let’s see the pros and cons, and which piece of software is better for your needs.
Apple’s Boot Camp
Boot Camp is the first choice of users who use Windows applications that don’t have Mac counterparts or processor-grazing programs that don’t run well on virtual machines. For instance, French users of Partypoker.fr don’t have to use a separate unit just to play the standalone version of PartyPoker. Despite being dominated by Samsung in the smartphone market, France is definitely a Mac country, with the sales in France surging to a whopping number of 12% as PC market loses ground in Europe. While users can play the Instant Play version of PartyPoker via their browsers—including Apple’s very own Safari—the standalone PartyPoker client has advantages. Among many other features absent in Instant Play, the standalone client provides smoother graphics and richer animations, direct launch from desktop, and favorite features such as table tiling and cascading for multi-table users. Since there is no client for Mac, some users opt to install Boot Camp in order to run PartyPoker via Windows. The only blowback of Boot Camp is you have to restart your system every time you have to change operating systems.
Parallels Desktop
Since some users want to run Mac and Windows OS at the same time and the idea of rebooting your computer whenever you need to switch operating systems is just a pain in their bottoms. The fine folks from Parallels created a virtual machine that runs in your Mac OS, and this virtual machine holds another operating system such as Windows. While any Mac can surely run two systems at the same time without compromising the performance and speed, programs with intense processor and memory requirements will surely eat huge chunks of your processing power which might lead to slower systems or worse, the infamous Sad Macintosh screen. In our opinion, Parallels Desktop is ideal for light to medium programs such as PartyPoker, but not for heavy applications like Adobe’s Photoshop or Premiere.
So we suggest you start with the free alternative from Apple and if it doesn’t fit the bill for you, then look at one of the great third party alternatives such as Parallels.
(This has been a guest post from an advertising partner)
Tags: advertiser, partner post
