Virtualization is an old idea but has become a mainstream technology in recent years. We’ve been using Parallels virtualization to run Windows on our MacBook. It works well for most things. But my older son wanted to play 3D games. Parallels 3.0 supports DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL so we gave it a try. We tried a few games and had no luck. Even a relatively old game (Microsoft Train Simulator) didn’t work.
We also tried the latest Beta of VMWare Fusion which supports DirectX 8.1. It’s a very slick VM but none of the games worked there either — well, one of them ran briefly but after a reboot, it would crash when launched.
OS virtualization works quite well on the MacBook. But there are limits (or at least limitations) with respect to graphics. So I ended up going with Bootcamp. Apple has done a good job on Bootcamp: partitioning the disk and installing the OS were relatively painless. And once Windows is running, Apple’s drivers for the iSight camera, Bluetooth, wireless networking, etc. were all done as a single integrated install.
The main negatives with Bootcamp that you need to reboot in switch operating systems and, unlike Parallels and VMWare, the Windows partition is fixed. And once partitioned, you can’t change its size. You need to recreate the partition to change it.
What about the games? All of them, including Flight Simulator X, run great. For all other uses of Windows, we’ll continue to use Parallels. There’s an option in Parallels to use the Bootcamp partition. We haven’t tried that yet but that approach may be the best of both worlds.
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