Hands-on running WinXP on IntelMac WITHIN Mac OS X

[Bob Crabtree]

WinXP running within Mac OSX
using Parallels' Workstation 2.1 Beta

Things really are starting to hot up on the IntelMac front after the successful bandit competition to find a reliable way to dual-boot between Windows XP and Mac OS X. On Wednesday came Apple's official release of BootCamp Beta - a utility that does the same - along with news that Parallels is also offering a beta utility but one that lets IntelMac users run Windows, Linux and other OSs from WITHIN Apple's OS X operating system.

We downloaded Parallels' solution (17.5MB) and tried it on a CPU that doesn't have built in virtualisation support and were surprised just how good the performance was, both for disk in/out and the CPU itself. We haven't yet run any benchmarks so can't qualify that impression but we'll try to do that soon.

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