I purchased a new 15 inch mac book pro from the Apple store this week and I must say I’m more than impressed with the performance! I have Windows running under Parallels Virtual Machine. Running Windows in a virtualization machine has exceeded my expectations.

In the past I’ve used Virtual PC for OS X and the performance was just OK. I really did not use VPC much because the performance was not what I was used to. If the speed is slowing me down (or the perception), I would rather get on another computer and do my work.

However, that is not the case with using Parallels on my new notebook. It’s as fast as running Windows XP on my P4 3.4 ghz desktop. I’m running Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 in VM and the performance is as good or better than my desktop.
I ‘m running a new beta version of Parallels that has improved many issues. They are coming up with more improvement very soon. One that caught my eye is that you’ll be able to run your games in the Virtual Machine and it will take advantage of your graphics card! Now that is impressive!

Based on my brother’s feedback with the amount of memory needed to run the VM and OS X at the same time, I went down Fry’s and bought an other Gig of RAM for $90! The Apple store wanted $300! That’s just nuts! (I’m sure its great memory but its not worth 3 times as much). With 2 Gigs of RAM, this machine is smoking fast!
Now when I am developing I can use Parallels and then with an alt+Enter key stroke, I can be back in OS X, checking email, viewing my RSS feeds and listening to music! (Well I can still listen to the OS X itunes when in the VM also) This is the best of both worlds!

I did use my external firewire drive to install the Virtual Machine. It does seem to be faster than running the VM from the internal hard drive. I’m not sure if this true, but it feels like it. I did this because it will avoid filling up my 100 gig hard drive. The other reason is when I replace my G5 desktop with the new Mac Pro, I can simply hook the external drive to that machine to work on it from home. I still perfer to use a desktop with a large monitor at home instead of a notebook.
I really don’t think Microsoft is going to get hurt by all the people switching to using Mac hardware. I think the company that is fearing these new computers is Dell.

Microsoft is stilling going to make money because people need Windows when they are using Bootcamp or Parallels, but Dell is going to lose people by the fact you can run Windows and OS X on the same machine. Plus Apple computers just look so much cooler!

I doubt there will ever be a time where I’ll have no need to use Windows. With the abilty to run both operating systems on the same machine, it made total sense to finally switch my notebook over to an Apple.