How to run Windows on Mac

With the advent of Apple Inc. moving from Power PC processors to Intel processors in 2006, it was hoped that this would enable Apple's Mac hardware to be able to run Microsoft Windows without having to use slow and inefficient emulation software. That soon became a reality.This article discusses the two main methods of doing so.

Boot Camp

Overview
The software allows the user to repartition their hard drive and will then take over the installation of Windows on this partition. Obviously, a legitimate copy of Windows needs to owned by the user on CD or DVD. Boot Camp also installs all the drivers needed to correctly function with the hardware built into the Mac. Pros
The method of using Boot Camp to run Windows on your system is without doubt the most efficient way of running Windows on a Mac, with standard PC hardware of a similar specification show little (if any) difference in performance in every respect. Cons
You can only run one operating system at a time - should you need to access some Mac software whilst booted into Windows (or vice versa), then a restart will be required.

Virtualisation

Overview
There are a number of virtualisation software solutions available that allow you to run Windows on your Mac but in a windowed environment, ie. you can still have Mac OS X running whilst you have a virtual machine running a copy of Windows. There are a number of software solutions that allow you to do this, with the main ones being Parallels, VMware Fusion and Virtual Box. Pros
As well as running Windows on your Mac in a windowed environment, a number of these virtualisation applications have other features. These can be total integration into Mac OS X (where you don't even see a Windows desktop) to allowing drag and drop between both operating systems. Cons
The performance of Windows programs in a virtual machine will certainly not match that of Windows being run via Boot Camp. Whilst this will be fine for things such as word processing, it can prove to be a hindrance with things like watching HD video or playing the latest games for example.