Windows – Best config for day time Windows user + occasional Mac usage

bootcampvmwarewindows

I bought a 2015 Macbook Pro 15" retina, 16GB memory 1TB SSD. I use Visual studio on day time on windows 8 and work on Mac, open source technologies at night and on weekends. I first thought of using VMWare and load windows for my day time use but i am a little confused on which config i should do.

  1. I am thinking of using bootcamp since all i do is windows during day time(may be dedicate 250GB ?)

  2. dedicate 500GB for Mac OS .

  3. Dedicate 200 GB for VMware on MacOS to load windows for some rare scenarios where i need to test both windows and mac apps at the same time (like Xamarin)

Is this a bad idea to config my laptop like this or do you guys have any ideas that you can share for this scenario ?

Update:
I just noticed another option of loading bootcamp volume in my Vmware Fusion 7. Can i use this option instead of item 3 for doing multi OS programming ?

Best Answer

Your layout sounds reasonable. I can't answer this fully for you, but what I'd suggest is setting up both a Boot Camp and VM (or the Boot Camp as a VM disk), trying both ways out for a while, and see what works best for you. Some of this is personal taste and you may just have to find out for yourself.

I have a similar setup: Retina MacBook Pro; Mac for personal use, Windows during the day for software development work. Been doing VMs a few years and tried the Boot Camp, both regular dual boot and with VMware 7's running a Boot Camp partition as a VM. They all worked okay.

For me, the deal-breaker was trackpad ergonomics under Boot Camp. When running just Windows, the trackpad response felt skittish and hard to work with, and Apple's Boot Camp driver doesn't give you much configurability. I never got used to it, and that sent me back to running VMs full time, because then you have OS X's trackpad ballistics controlling things. This is a matter of personal taste, so you'll want to try it out yourself.

Two other big things to consider are whether you will want a) resizability of your VM's drives, or b) drive snapshotting. You can't do either with Boot Camp, and I've found they come in very handy, especially if you're doing software development.

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