Wednesday, September 19, 2007

VMware Fusion

I just switched from using Parallels to VMware's Fusion product for running Windows (and Windows applications) on my Mac. I love the "Unity" mode of Fusion that allows each Windows application to run in it's own native window on your Mac desktop. It's a bit of smoke and mirrors but it to the users it looks like each app is native.

Check out the new Winamp beta running on my Mac desktop.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any specific reason you made the switch? Just curious as I'm about to go down the Parallels route... again...

jherskowitz said...

Actually a couple of people have asked that. I didn't really "switch". I had Parallels on my old company's MacBook, then left and got a new one. I installed the (14 day) trial of Parallels with the intention of buying it myself for this machine, but then read some positive reviews of Fusion before I pulled the trigger. So, I installed the 30 day trial of Fusion and liked it. I still haven't bought either yet... but at this point I think I'll go with Fusion just because I like the "Unity" mode.

Anonymous said...

Fair enough. I believe I will have to give it a try as well.

Thanks! :)

timojhen said...

j - any noticeable speed difference or CPU utilization differences?

My primary complaints about Parallels are it's speed to start up (minutes, much of which has my MBP tied in a knot), and the fact it's using 25% of my CPU even when it's idle (nothing running in the container etc).

I've debated moving to Fusion, may be more motivated if it's kinder to the MBP...

Timojhen

Anonymous said...

I've tried both and I have to say that even if Parallels uses more juice, it's got VMWare beat on polish and integration. Try the latest build; its much easier to launch windows apps directly in OS X with parallels, and copying files between the two is a breeze. Parallel's coherence mode seems just as good as unity to me. Parallels simply works much better running my bootcamp partition as a VM; Fusion took forever to load and ran slowly, and I couldn't easily access the bootcamp partition while the VM was running.