Parallels, Boot Camp and Vista

[JimmyEatWorms]

As parallels now supports booting off a Boot Camp partition (so you can keep the same OS installation for a VM and a "real" windows install, I was just wondering how well this thorks when it comes to product activation of Vista (or XP for that matter). Surely every time you boot into either you will have to reactivate as all your hardware has effectively changed. Or am i missing something?

 

[Logan09]

Parallels running on the bootcamp VM requires you to activate XP in bootcamp and in Parallels, however once you've activated both that's it. It doesn't ask you to reactivate every time you change between bootcamp and parallels. Don't know how it manages this, but it definitely works fine. Vista's the same as far as I'm aware.

The only problem is other software that requires activation (such as Microsoft Office), which behaves exactly as you described - i.e. you have to reactivate every time you change between bootcamp and parallels.

 

[Beepcake]

I'm currently using VMWare fusion booting from a Boot Camp partition because I find it a fair bit faster than Parallels. It's a world apart speed wise from using a file based disk image, much more usable when you are doing intensive work on it. I have a VLK XP installed but normal Office and haven't had to reactivate when switching between the two; whether VMWare is better in that regard I don't know.

VMWare is currently free so it's worth a look

 

[slinxy]

I used to run this setup - like prevs said to only need to activate windows once.... as parallels setup another hardware configuration for itself that it uses; with basic changes the drivers to match the setup.

I have never come across the issue that I needed to re-activate any other software; as a far as I'm aware ms software activation works with the windows PID and that does not change regardless if your in bootcamp mode or parallels mode.

I could not get Parallels Coherence mode to work when using a bootcamp partition of windows, but I'm not sure if this is a limitation of my macbook or the software. I also recently tired Vista on boot camp; but the verison of Parallels I was using was not able of use the vista install from boot camp. Therefore I stopped sinning and removed all windows from my mac,

 

[JimmyEatWorms]

Cool. Does this work with an OEM license as well as Retail?

 

[slinxy]

Legally speaking no

 

[JimmyEatWorms]

Gotcha.