How to install Windows 10 with Boot Camp. Once you've downloaded a Windows 10 ISO, you can complete the following steps. Launch Boot Camp Assistant from the Utilities folder in Applications. Click Continue. Boot Camp should automatically locate the ISO file on your system. You can use an Apple keyboard or a keyboard designed for Microsoft Windows with your Mac. Many of the keys that you'd see on a PC have equivalent keys on.
Despite the Mac's recent gains in market share, Windows is still the dominant operating system, especially in businesses. That means there may be times when you need to run the Microsoft OS: perhaps there’s an application your company uses that’s only available for Windows, or you’re a web developer and you need to test your sites in a true native Windows web browser. Or maybe you want to play computer games that aren’t available for OS X. Whatever your reason for running Windows, there are a number of ways your Mac can do it for you. If you need to run just one or two specific Windows apps, you may be able to do so using ( ), which can run such applications without requiring you to actually install Windows. (CrossOver's vendor, CodeWeavers, maintains a.) If you need a more flexible, full-fledged Windows installation, you still have several other options.
You could use Apple’s own, which lets you install Windows on a separate partition of your hard drive. Or you could install one of three third-party virtualization programs: ( ), ( ), or ( ), each of which lets you run Windows (or another operating system) as if it were just another OS X application. Of those four options, Boot Camp offers the best performance; your Mac is wholly given over to running Windows.
But you have to reboot your system to use Boot Camp, so you can’t use it at the same time as OS X; it's Mac or Windows, but not both. And while VirtualBox is free, setting it up is complicated—downright geeky, at times—and it lacks some bells and whistles you might want. Which leaves Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion as your best alternatives. So, of those two, how do you decide which one is right for you?
In the past, I tried to answer that question by, to see how they did on specific tasks. This time, however, that task-based approach didn’t work, largely because (with a couple exceptions that are noted below) the latest versions of Fusion and Parallels Desktop are nearly indistinguishable in performance. So instead of picking one program over the other based on how well it performs a given task, the choice now hinges on some more subjective factors. So this time around, I’ll look at those and try to explain how the two programs differ on each.
Note that, for the most part, I've focused primarily on using these programs to run Windows on your Mac. You can, of course, use them to run other operating systems—including OS X Lion itself—but that’s not the focus here. General Performance As noted, both Parallels Desktop and Fusion perform well when it comes to running Windows 7 on a Mac.
Macworld Labs ran both programs through PCWorld’s WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, and the results were close: overall, VMware Fusion beat out Parallels Desktop by a very slight margin (113 to 118, meaning Fusion was 18 percent faster than a theoretical baseline system, Parallels Desktop 13 percent). Parallels Desktop was faster than Fusion in some individual tests, Fusion was faster in others, and in the rest the differences were almost too close to call.
Parallels Desktop 7 vs.
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s. Every day (except Sunday) from mid-July until late September, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a standout free or low-cost program. You can view a list of this year’s apps, updated daily, on our, and you can visit the for past Mac Gems reviews. OS X’s Boot Camp lets boot your Mac into Windows, temporarily turning it into a Windows PC.
It’s a great feature, but if you value your Windows data—or if you want to be able to restore your Boot Camp partition to another Mac or to a new hard drive—you should back up your Windows partition just as you back up your OS X data. In my experience, many Boot Camp users don't. Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that even the best Mac backup software—including OS X’s own Time Machine—can’t properly back up a Boot Camp partition.
And even standout Mac-cloning utilities such as SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are unable to make clones of your Boot Camp partition for migrating or restoring your Windows install., on the other hand, can do all these things. (I, and it’s been updated many times since then.) This utility can create a disk image of your Mac’s Boot Camp partition, making it easy to back up that partition, restore it from a backup, or transfer it to another Mac. You can even use Winclone 4 to.
To clone your Boot Camp partition, you just select it in Winclone’s Sources list, click the large Save Image icon in the Destinations pane to the right, and then click the Save Image button. If you plan on restoring to a Boot Camp partition that's smaller than your current partition, the Shrink Windows (NTFS) Filesystem option lets you first compress your current Boot Camp installation. (For extra data security, the developer recommends before cloning. Similarly, if you’re migrating Windows installations between computers, you should use Windows’s SysPrep utility before cloning.) Choose a location for the saved image, and Winclone creates an OS X disk image containing a perfect clone of your Boot Camp partition.
Restoring that image is just as easy. You just select the image in Winclone’s Sources list, choose your (presumably empty) Boot Camp partition in the Destinations pane, and click Restore To Volume. New in 4 The latest version of Winclone adds a number of useful new features. For example, you can now use Winclone to clone an actual Windows PC to a disk image for later restoring, or migrate an actual Windows PC directly to a Boot Camp partition on your Mac. Or if you want to migrate an existing Boot Camp partition to another Mac, you can skip the disk-image step by placing the source Mac in Target Disk Mode, connecting it (via FireWire or Thunderbolt) to the target Mac, and transfer the Boot Camp partition between them. You can even do the same with a real Windows PC, though this requires that you connect the PC's hard drive directly to your Mac. You can also now restore a Boot Camp partition over a local network by enabling the Share Winclone Images On Network option in Winclone, and then running Winclone on both the source and destination machines.
The source Mac’s Boot Camp partition will appear in the destination Mac’s Source list. The source Mac will also share any clone images you've created. (Note that you must have a Boot Camp partition on the destination Mac for any of these procedures. You can do this using Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant, or you can for manually creating a Boot Camp partition.) As our GemFest reviews are brief, I’ve only summarized the capabilities of Winclone 4. Suffice it to say that if you use Boot Camp frequently, or on multiple Macs, Winclone should be in your tooklit. It’s easy to use, it works well, and the developer provides.
(A $100 Pro version of Winclone 4, aimed at system administrators and multi-computer organizations, supports an unlimited number of computers and—my favorite pro-level feature—lets you for quickly restoring a Boot Camp image to one or more Macs.) Want to stay up to date with the latest Gems? You can follow Mac Gems. You can also subscribe to the.