For many generations now, Macs have been more than powerful enough to run Windows effectively in a virtual machine. I bought my first Mac to run Windows, although at the time I used Apple’s dual-booting Boot Camp. Then I switched to Parallels Desktop 7 and things got a lot easier.

Now Parallels is better than ever. The latest version, Parallels Desktop 8, lets Microsoft’s Windows 8 run side-by-side with OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Let’s take a look at this popular virtualization environment and see if it’s right for you.

Installation

Minimum requirements for Parallels Desktop 8 are the Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) or later, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, and 15 GB of disk space for each virtual machine.

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