Does Windows run as fast on a MAC as a PC?

all i have heard is that a Mac runs Vista faster than a PC. and i remember that Wired magazine tested gaming laptops and the fastest/best one was a Macbook Pro running Vista

here’s a good article on it

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9003111

from what I remember, results are pretty good on a high end mac…

The new Macs will come with Boot Camp, which can run Windows. I’m not sure how good it is. If you are not pleased, you can download Parallels.

Bootcamp will always be faster than parallels, you won’t be doing any emulating

It depends.. You have two options.

Option number one is to use Boot Camp. This will be just like running Windows on the computer. You will have to reboot the computer when you switch back and forth between Windows and OS X. Only one OS will be running at a time. It will run Windows at full speed.

Option number two is to use virtualization. With this Windows will run in a window while OS X is still Running. It will be slower but it actually isn’t that bad. I wouldn’t want to edit video but I would certainly use it to edit a spreadsheet.

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year (through 10/25/07) is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year—or for that matter, ever—is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware.

The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.

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And that was with Boot Camp. Parallels and Fusion are emulators, and while spiffy in their own right, cannot be as fast as running native, which Boot Camp does.

@robmandu, dont be so sure that apple doesnt care whether or not you run windows. because if you run osx they can make money from you buying iLife, .Mac, Final Cut, Aperture… whereas they cant if you run windows

What rob means is that apple does not cater to the Mac users who run windows on their machine.

And above the em-dash, all of that text is a quote from the linked article.

=)

Well, my friend runs Mac OS X on his Acer, so that’s pretty nifty… But I think that windows does seem to run a bit faster on a Mac via boot camp.

my overall comment, is that if you can run BOTH on a mac, why not go with that. at least you get options, and its not like you sacrifice speeds when running vista on the mac, most of the time you gain speed

My MacBook is two years old (2 ghz core duo, 2 gigs ram). Under Boot Camp my first gen MacBook boots Vista Ultimate in 30 to 45 seconds. Not too shabby for an “old” computer IMO :)

@thetmle, not bad at all i would say. faster than my roommates boots it, and his is a dell

Parallels isn’t an emulator, it’s a hardware abstraction layer. Performance is slightly worse than just running Boot Camp, but not enough to matter. In any case, the Mac is currently the fastest PC for Vista.

@waterskier2007: Apple doesn’t mind users using Windows on a Mac because they know that once someone uses Mac OS X they won’t want to run Windows!

Sub-question:

Any rumors of Bootcamp being able to run without rebooting? Would it be possible in theory?

Answer to one: No.

Answer to two: No, but you can use parallels or VMware to virtualize windows within OSX without rebooting.

The way I have always done it (I run both actually) VMWare is faster, but built more for business applications. Parallels is better for entertainment/gaming.

Bootcamp makes you reboot to get into Windows. That can be a PITA, but it also lets you use all of the Macs resources instead of sharing them with OS X. I setup a guy to run Bootcamp so he could run Windows exclusively on his Macbook Pro because he’s “afraid of changing over to OS X because [he has] used Windows for so long.”

Hey, whatever. He’s using a Mac! He’ll get the point eventually and migrate to the best OS on Earth eventually, I’m sure.

What is it with the caps “MAC”?? What does it stand for? It’s just ‘Mac.”

Majik Apple Computer