New Mini

super-fly · 05-09-2008, 11:02 PM

I think I may have just snagged myself a relatively inexpensive intel mini off craigslist. I'm finally going to be able to run a decent navigation program. My question is what are people using to run XP; Vmware, parallels? I was thinking Vmware. Also, are you running a "full" version of xp or some sort of mini version. For the actual navigation I was thinking iGuidance. Thanks in advance.

NeonDev · 05-09-2008, 11:57 PM

there are people at my work that use both parallels and VM ware. VM ware comes highly praised (plus there is a v2 public beta out now) Parallels eats ram for breakfast and is kind of poky even on high end hardware from what I have seen.

I also know VM ware can use the boot camp partition to run don't know if parallels can do that but it seems like it would make everything much snappier to run off an actually formated piece of hardware versus a virtual disk drive

Bugbyte · 05-10-2008, 08:49 AM

I've also heard, just anecdotally, that VM ware works a bit better.

iGuidance seems to be the nav software of choice and the RR guys have done a lot of work integrating it into the front end.

If you don't care about a Windows FE, Fibreoptic just did a review of the new Garmin Mobile PC software. It's only $60 and looks pretty nice.

natedawgg · 05-10-2008, 10:59 AM

parallels 3 can use the bootcamp partition

kandyman676 · 05-10-2008, 02:18 PM

Both can use bootcamp paritions since their 2nd versions.

I've used both Parallels and VMWare fusion. VM fusion for the win. Less of a memory hog, and does what it is suppose to. You will see a huge performance increase if you do your WinXP as a bootcamp partition vs a VMware virtual harddrive, and then let VMWare fusion access it.

Also I would recommending stripping down your WinXP install with nLite to remove the bloat from it and also using SP3 to avoid the 150+ patches.

NeonDev · 05-10-2008, 05:19 PM

don't forget to update your boot camp before installing xp SP3 or things get f'ed up

TTeuer · 05-10-2008, 06:27 PM

Benchmarks have found that Parallels runs XP faster and VMWare runs Vista better. VMware is multiprocessor aware. Parallels is not.

You are going to want to max out your Mac Mini's RAM regardless of which virtual machine you run.

pip · 05-10-2008, 08:33 PM

Also please be aware that if iGuidance is going to be your choice of navigation and Fusion your choice of virtualization software that iGuidance will not allow installation under VMWare. Parallels works fine. If you will be installing Windows in boot camp and using that install to run under Fusion then you wont have a problem as you can run the install program from boot camp and once installed iGuidance will run fine under Fusion.

Of the two, I think Fusion has the edge over Parallels.

hanzov69 · 05-11-2008, 11:41 PM

I have only my own anecdotal observations to back this up...but:

On a machine with a sparse amount of RAM, VMWare tends to be better overall.
However, if you have an excess of RAM available, Parallels is a lot quicker than VMWare.

If you intend to use Coherence/Fusion modes (where windows is basically hidden and you can "fake" run Win32 apps native) Parallels works much, much better.

YMMV of course, but if you are running this on a used Intel Mini, go with Fusion.

Machinehead · 05-12-2008, 12:56 PM

Fusion works a ton better with safe-sleep from my experience.