The best way to run Windows on your Mac

Macworld - 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 theres an application your company uses thats only available for Windows, or youre 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 arent 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 just a single Windows app, you may be able to do so using CrossOver ( Macworld rated 3 out of 5 mice ), which can run such applications without requiring you to actually install Windows.

If you need a more flexible, full-fledged Windows installation, you still have several other options. You could use Apples own Boot Camp, which lets you install Windows on a separate partition of your hard drive. Or you could install one of three third-party virtualization programs: Parallels Desktop 7 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), VMware Fusion ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), or VirtualBox ( Macworld rated 3 out of 5 mice ), 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 cant 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 complicateddownright geeky, at timesand 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 comparing virtualization programs head-to-head, to see how they did on specific tasks. This time, however, that task-based approach didnt 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, Ill look at those and try to explain how the two programs differ on each.