Bootcamp: Production ready or just a hack?

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McFry

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I'm plenty familiar with what bootcamp is, and I've installed it a couple of times on a larf, but having never owned Apple hardware I cant vouch for the reliability of it. I've always felt it was more or less just a hack, something drummed up once Apple systems stopped being so proprietary in their hardware choices. Clearly it's a work in progress as Apple has had to provide in-house support for it for years. To me this doesnt sound reliable, this sounds experimental. I have users wanting MacPro's for production environment use who will primarily be Windows users, so they want Bootcamp of course. They seem to think that Apple branded hardware is superior to anything Dell ships, and that buying a bunch of Mac's with the expressed purpose of running Windows 100% of the time is an effective solution. I do not feel this will end well, unless of course bootcamp really is that reliable that you can basically convert any Mac into a Windows box and run Windows 24/7 with a full gamut of software and hardware peripherals attached.
 
BootCamp is a fancy name for dual boot. Apple also "fills in" drivers for their particular hardware like the trackpads. I don't understand the "in-house support" you speak of. Your house? Apple does periodically update it because they have their own wrapper/installer for getting Windows installed, which needs updating for new Windows versions (and things like USB stick installs). They also update the drivers.

I don't think BootCamp is "immature" in any way, but it's not Apple's focus. Windows running is a convenience for the user.
 
Do people prefer boot camp over parallels? i know when i hit the parallels icon over the RDP Icon she gets pissed off at me. Guess it is a difficult task for her to shut it down and "the memory gets used up booting it" lol.........
 
McFry said:
unless of course bootcamp really is that reliable that you can basically convert any Mac into a Windows box and run Windows 24/7 with a full gamut of software and hardware peripherals attached.
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One of my previous employers (one of the largest aerospace and defense contractors on the planet) had our division running primarily Mac Pros with Windows via boot camp. It's plenty stable, and was quite a discount over the equivalent HP or Dell workstations.

"Boot camp" is just fancy Apple-speak for "EFI dual boot" back before EFI was common. It's like asking if "Retina" displays are any good. They're just high-DPI displays.
 
Running Windows on native mac hardware has been found that the machine is faster than a native PC. Apple usually releases a bootcamp driver update ever 6 months. Of course, you can also update some individual drivers as well.
 
When our company went from PC to Mac hardware and started to run windows apps on parallels, the need for hardware or operating system service drastically reduced as a result.

All those pesky windows problems are history because now we don't need to install anything but the absolutely necessary apps on windows and do everything else on OSX. Even better, if you feel like testing something on Windows that you expect may get wonky, just click a button and you have snapshot your Windows and you can return to previous snapshot with a second click later if you want your 'experiments' to be totally erased afterwards.

The ability to do these things have limited the time spent to maintaining workstations by at least 80%. The last 20% have gone to pure hardware problems. Instead of someones windows porking and/or hardware breaking every few months, we now have a laptop failure once in a couple years. We're quite happy with the experience.
 
Bootcamp works fine, but there are very few compelling reasons to use it over a VM anymore.
 
Bootcamp = dual boot nothing more
parallels is just a virtual machine from a specific company, nothing more.

Choose the right one for your application don't be fooled by marketing renaming schemes. And if you choose a virtual machine look at all the options not just parallels.
 
rudy said:
Bootcamp = dual boot nothing more
parallels is just a virtual machine from a specific company, nothing more.

Choose the right one for your application don't be fooled by marketing renaming schemes. And if you choose a virtual machine look at all the options not just parallels.
Click to expand...

Other options such as virtualbox or vmware fusion can't compete with parallels. Parallels milks you a 100 bucks now and then but if you use it for work its worth it.
 
B00nie said:
Other options such as virtualbox or vmware fusion can't compete with parallels. Parallels milks you a 100 bucks now and then but if you use it for work its worth it.
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Fusion has much better support for Linux guests, and better performance on the very high end (you can configure up to 16 vCPUs and 64GB of RAM per guest). It's also compatible out-of-the-box with other VMWare VMs, including ESXi/vSphere containers, which can save you hours of work if you already use VMWare elsewhere. If you want to play games on Windows in a VM, Parallels is better. For pretty much everything else, especially productivity, go with Fusion.
 
B00nie said:
When our company went from PC to Mac hardware and started to run windows apps on parallels, the need for hardware or operating system service drastically reduced as a result.

All those pesky windows problems are history because now we don't need to install anything but the absolutely necessary apps on windows and do everything else on OSX. Even better, if you feel like testing something on Windows that you expect may get wonky, just click a button and you have snapshot your Windows and you can return to previous snapshot with a second click later if you want your 'experiments' to be totally erased afterwards.

The ability to do these things have limited the time spent to maintaining workstations by at least 80%. The last 20% have gone to pure hardware problems. Instead of someones windows porking and/or hardware breaking every few months, we now have a laptop failure once in a couple years. We're quite happy with the experience.
Click to expand...

You are aware Apple system use the same hardware that PC's do.. so if you had hardware breaking this often, someone was doing something very very wrong.

As for hosing windows, again, someone was doing something very very wrong, you can just as easily do a restore point in windows if you had to do something to work working install, or just do a VM......
 
MrGuvernment said:
You are aware Apple system use the same hardware that PC's do.. so if you had hardware breaking this often, someone was doing something very very wrong.
Click to expand...

Yep and those someone would be Fujitsu, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba etc.
 
B00nie said:
Instead of someones windows porking and/or hardware breaking every few months, we now have a laptop failure once in a couple years. We're quite happy with the experience.
Click to expand...
My client has several hundred Mac laptops in use. Over the last couple of years I have accumulated several drawers of dead MacBook Pros I cannibalize for parts. Screens with lines through them, screens failed completely, wonky trackpads, failed Wifi cards, logic board failures.. oh and how could I forget dramatically failed batteries.. They do love to bulge and pop out anything in their path. A spontaneously failed battery recently died so awesomely the trackpad popped clear out of the chassis (which was bent horrifically). Apple's response: not a defect.

This doesn't include laptops that were obviously dropped.
 
Toshiba, reliable. thats a joke.

Every toshiba, not many, maybe 8, i have dealt with over the past years all died from over heating or needing a mainboard replaced and then dieing.
 
Yup, I've run bootcamp for extended periods and it's extremely stable. As was mentioned earlier in this thread, on the new Mac Pro, only Windows 8+ is supported, so if you hoped to run 7, you're outta luck. Other than that, go for it.
 
I don't know about many other people, but I've had a hard time setting up bootcamp to run Windows 7. It never seems to find the partitioned part of the drive that I created using bootcamp. Not sure what the issue is I'm running into. But the few times I've used bootcamp, it runs very well and even better than Parallels.
 
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