Parallels or Fusion advice

[Magnus]

I'm getting ready to set up a new Mac and I need Windows on it, going with Vista probably but could be XP too. I want to run the occasional game so I would want Bootcamp.

But really gaming is not going to be very often but pretty much every day I'll run Office 2007 (Outlook mostly) and IE, so I don't want to reboot all the time.

So as far as I know both Parallels and Fusion will run a Windows installed with Bootcamp in virtualization, right? Does anyone have good/bad experience doing that with either? I've not done that personally so I wanted to check. I guess I could have Windows in both Bootcamp as well as in virtualization but that seems a waste of disk space.

I started out running Parallels then switched to Fusion when it came out, so I have licenses for both and no particular ties to either.

And I know there were problems with Vista in the beginning in terms of supporting games, but how is it lately?

[Magnus]

This guy seems to have done something like what I'm thinking about.

[Pawan]

I have done exactly what you are thinking about with Windows XP and Parallels.

I used bootcamp to do a clean install of Windows XP and then configured Parallels to use the bootcamp partition. I have not had any problems to date and everything does work smoothly. Could either boot up with Windows XP or just start a virtual session from Parallels. Everything picks up exactly from the last palce it was left no matter how you had used XP last.

I had tried Fusion when it was in beta mode, but somehow I liked the interface and easy usage of Parallels compared to VmWare. Maybe it was just the first mover advantage Parallels had and it had me hooked and I never bothered to use VmWare again as Parallels just does everything I want without any problems.

[watteau]

I have Parallels running the same bootcamp partition with vista ultimate, I had a few issues to begin with because of the vista boot-loader but found an amazing app, that fixes the boot-loader, it was not recognising the other partitions and asking me to use FSDISK, once that problem was fixed parallels is awesome. Bootcamp for the odd game though,

[Magnus]

I did like Pawan on my MBP with a 30GB Bootcamp partition and it works just great. Only little snag is with Fusion Windows (Vista Business) can't hibernate, just shutdown. I'm guessing that's a limitation of running it this way and it's not a huge problem. Mostly I run Vista with Fusion at work so I start it in the morning and shut it down at night. Then I can boot into Vista with Bootcamp when I need to.

[fangpyre]

Only little snag is with Fusion Windows (Vista Business) can't hibernate, just shutdown.

Parallels had an option to suspend the virtual OS.
I think what it does is take a snapshot of the current position of the OS and just starts back from there. It doesn't look like it has anything to do with the OS itself, and it appears mostly unaware of this happening to it.

It is more stable then sleep and hibernate, and beats the hell out of booting every time you need something from Windoze.

No idea if Fusion has a similar feature.