What's the best choice for running Windows on a Mac?

[AylmerQc]

 Boot Camp, Parallel and VM fusion ware: Which one to go with?

[z-mac]

If you need top performance, use Boot Camp. M-Windows runs natively on your hard disk. Apple supplies the drivers.

Parallels and Vmware Fusion are similar products, but this article shows some performance comparisons as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VMware_Fusion_and_Parallels_Desktop

[AylmerQc]

Thanks.
I'm going according to your advice. HAlfway there I believe,some hicups along the way. but it seems to be installing fine now....

[z-mac]

By the way, there is another free option that may be possible for you to use, depending on the programs you need. I run some older M-Windows programs using these Wine builds for OS X:

http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/

Wine is faster than VMware and Parallels because Wine is *not an emulator*. VMware and Parallels need to have the OS installed. Wine is a reverse-engineered API for running M-Windows programs -- you don't have to install M-Windows.

[AylmerQc]

JUst a small problem I'm having is that when booting up, if I don't press the Option button, I get a menu offering me the choice of Win Xp or Win Xp Setup. If I don't choose Win Xp, the computer tries to boot with the Setup but since the disc isn't there I get a Fatal Error message,thne I have to reboot once more. How can I delete the setup option AND boot up in OSX unless I choose to use Win XP?

[z-mac]

You can use
http://refit.sourceforge.net/

to manage your EFI boot mechanism. It's an excellent utility.

If you don't want to use rEFIt, you can control the M-Windows boot options from within M-Windows itself. From within M-Windows, right-click My Computer. Then select
Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > Settings > System Startup.

The actual boot data for your M-Windows partition is contained in the file BOOT.INI.

[AylmerQc]

Hey thanks again. At first it didn't work after I installed it and re-booted so I re-installed again and after a couple of re-boots it works great. Pretty much what I needed, quite similar to Boot Magic...