It’s been a month or so since I posted about my experiences with the Parallels and VMWare Fusion demos. Since then I’ve installed Vista on a Bootcamp partition and that seems to run nicely (though logging in takes for ever) and had a chance to use the demos to access Vista off the Bootcamp partition (though it seems to be either Bootcamp + Parallels or Bootcamp + VMWare not Bootcamp + Parallels + VMWare (obviously not running the virtual machine systems at the same time).
Both Fusion and Parallels worked nicely with the Bootcamp partition and installed their helper applications for sharing data etc. just fine. I tested out the Direct X support – useful for games and for other software that uses that graphics support – and found Parallels 3 was not good, and VMWare stuttered sometimes. The upgrade to Parallels 4 demo produced some nicer Direct X behaviour though.
At the end of the day either system – Parallels or VMWare – would do the job for me (like running Camtasia to make training videos showing how to access eLearning resources under Window). Parallels seemed to have the more integrated interface with MacOSX but did seem to suck resources out of the computer. VMWare seemed a little less integrated but felt (subjectively) less resource hungry and more snappy at installing operating systems etc. If push came to shove I’d probably go the VMWare route for my needs. (However I’ll need to run that past the people who control my budget). Bootcamp works, but there’s been a few times recently where I’d want to have Entourage and NetNewsWire running while doing Windows stuff too.
