About 3 weeks ago, I decided to get myself a new MacBook. So far, I absolutely love it. Using it along side my primary desktop machine at the office has been amazing. I started out using the MacBook only for simple, personal stuff (email, chat, iTunes, etc) and continued to use my desktop for actual development. After about a day or two of that (and an upcoming trip to Chicago), I realized that I would need to be doing some more intense work on my MacBook.

One of the main reasons I bought a MacBook (besides the fact that they are damn sexy), was because they switched to the Intel chips, thus allowing me to also run Windows. This was huge for me, because aside from being primarily a PC person (and having Windows installed on my MB would be a huge comfort), I do all the browser testing in the office and feel it is my obligation as a developer to test any site we build in everyone browser I can get my hands on. Our previous setup was a little daunting (having a separate G3 desktop that I'd boot up when I needed to test something on the mac), so having the MB was the perfect solution. The only question was do I go with Bootcamp or Parallels?

At first, I was strictly using Bootcamp because...well...it was free. It was fun to play with, but not perfect. Then the other day, Jon Hicks asked people their thoughts on Parallels. It inspired me to go out and install Parallels and see what it was like. He are some thoughts so far for both Bootcamp and Parallels:

Bootcamp is Apple's own solution to running Windows XP. It will be included in Apple's next OSX release, Leopard.
Pros: You can pretty much run Windows XP natively without too many issues. You are partitioning your harddrive and actually installing a copy of XP on your harddrive. This allows for great performance with software like Adobe CS2 (better than the Rosetta version in OSX). On startup, you just hold down "option" and you get the option of what OS you want to load (OSX or Windows). Oh, and it's free!
Cons: Bootcamp is still in beta. This means that it's not perfect. I had a few small drivers issues (plugging your headphones in doesn't kill the speakers), but other than the small things, it ran perfect. Also, it is a pain to have to restart your computer just to switch OS. If I want to test something quick in XP, I have to close all my applications and restart. For quick switches, it's just annoying.

Parallels is a proprietary software that allows you to emulate any OS on your Mac. It is the method of choice by most for using Windows on a Mac.
Pros: Run any OS (not just Windows XP) in OSX. Full screen it and it is just like any other application window. You can Apple-Tab all you want between applications in OSX and Alt-Tab through your Windows applications no problem. This is great for quick testing of websites in the 9 or 10 browsers that I have installed on my MB. You can also install multiple version of the same OS without any problem. I'll be doing this so that I have a copy of IE6 on one version of XP and IE7 on another.
Cons: It's not free, but I'm sure a lot of you 1337 h4x0rz can fix that (not that I condone that sort of activity!). Also, from what I've noticed so far, the video/graphics drivers aren't as crisp as with Bootcamp. XP with Parallels seems a little pixel-y.

Overall, I've enjoyed using both of them and I will probably keep both Bootcamp and Parallels installed on my MacBook. I'll have Bootcamp running XP with all my major applications that run better when run natively. I will also have two copies of XP running with Parallels that will really only be used for browser testing. I'm sure I'll be using Parallels a lot more than Bootcamp, but it's comforting knowing that it's there. If anyone else had any experience/thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.