what's the difference between parallels and the duel boot crap that came preinstalled on my macbook? Is this Parallels something all of you would recommed using over what ever is preinstalled.
Parallels is a virtual machine software similar to the old school Vmware workstation for windows that simulated a hardware sandbox for installing an OS.
Virtualization was introduced, allowing a virtual machine direct hardware access, making a virtual machine no longer "Virtual" in the sense that it was slow and simulated, it was now just simply passed directly to the hardware for instructions. The requirement here is that an x86 computer can only "virtualize" an x86 OS.
Parallels and Vmware fusion will probably both meet anyones needs these days, maybe I'll put together an in depth comparison
Boot camp is different in that you directly boot to Windows or OS X. Booting directly into OS X or windows is no different from booting your PC into Windows.
Parallels and Vmware offer the ability to run your bootcamp installation from within OS X and still maintain bootcamp, but can be kinda unreliable at times. I'd say your best bets are probably just using Boot camp and a windows install seperately in Parallels or Vmware, to prevent any issues.