John Hasson

I spent a few months with VMWare Fusion and then Parallels on a BootCamp Partition. Both work fine, but I like Parallels better.

Both products have a free trial. I started with VMWare’s Fusion since I use VMWare’s server products and am pretty happy with them. Install was easy, it didn’t take long to get my bootcamp XP partition up and running in Fusion. When setting it up I ended up creating a SMB share on my XP system and then accessing it via OSX to get at my windows files–I didn’t see any other solution for accessing my windows files easily while Fusion was running the bootcamp image. Every now and then I would get screen artifacts from Unity (makes the mac and xp windows all part of the osx desktop). And kept messing up on my Command+C vs Ctrl+C when switching quickly between OS’es.

Well my 30 days was nearly up, time to try parallels. Install was just as easy. Paralells had just a few things that made it come off as more polished. It already gives me a share on the mac desktop pointing to the Bootcamp image while Parallels is running. The Coherence works about the same (I still get screen artifacts occasionally), and Parallels automatically maps Command+C to Ctrl+C for me (great for when I forget to switch). I ended up buying Parallels primarily because it seemed to integrate with Mac just a little better then VMWare’s fusion.

At this point I would make a cool table to show things mapped out.. but here is the summary:
Parallels has better OSX integration (great for Visual Studio), but VMWare will let you play Quake! You decide which is more important for you

Tags: Advice //