You read that right. At least that's what CNET's Daniel Begun says. He ran a series of tests comparing the performance of Windows XP SP2 on an Intel Mac using Apple's Boot Camp Public Beta (which gives users a dual-boot system), Windows XP on Parallels Desktop for Mac (which allows users to run both OSs at the same time and seamlessly switch back and forth between them), and Mac OS X Version 10.4.6. All these were installed on a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chip.

The CNET labs ran a few of their own benchmarks on the MacBook Pro to see how the three compared in terms of how the applications ran on each. Their test comprised attempting to process images using Photoshop CS2, running Microsoft Office 2003, encoding iTunes, playing Quake 4, and just plain booting each of the systems up.

I'll spare you the gory details; suffice to say that XP-on-Parallels only beat the others in the boot time test. But as Begun says, "This also just goes to show the danger of drawing too many conclusions from this type of testing... If we spent more time tweaking Parallels, we probably could have beefed up its overall performance." Begun and the lab testers were won over by Parallels' overall stability, usability and the ease of switching between OSs it affords users - its performance shortcomings were negligible given its advantages. Sounds A-OK to me, what do you guys think?