VMware Fusion, 1-User (Academic License Version)

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Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000W3T3BM
• Item model number: FUS-ENG-M-AP
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 17, 2007
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,848 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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Product Description

Product Description

Run Windows and Mac applications side-by-side on your Mac, without rebooting, using VMware Fusion.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazingly simple to set up and use, with a couple of caveats, June 28, 2009

By	B. Christensen "Frequent traveler, business o... (Santa Barbara, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I have been very impressed with how easy Fusion has been to set up and use. I had a couple of hiccups early on, which caused me to have to run a full system check using my original Windows CD, it has run flawlessly.

For reference, I am running Leopard 10.5.6 for my host operating system and Windows XP Professional SP3 for the guest OS. Installed on the guest OS is Office 2007 and Neat Receipts Professional (my primary reason for installing Fusion and Windows on my Macbook Pro)

A couple of caveats:

1) If you go back and forth between a corporate network and a home network, particularly if you use a VPN when outside the office, you will need to change the networking mode from NAT to bridged (the default is NAT).

2) Don't twiddle with the number of processors in the virtual machine once it is "built" and the guest OS is installed. There is no reference to this in any of the documentation, but I believe this is what caused me to have to rebuild the guest operating system (Windows XP Pro SP3).

3) No matter what I have tried, I cannot get the Fusion guest to print to my network printer on my home network, which is standard Ehternet using Apple Airport devices. Printing to the office network (a networked printer available on the domain) is no problem, and printing from other Windows computers on my home network is not a problem using Bonjour either.

4) USB devices can be a bit tricky - if you plug in your iPod while running fusion, Windows may "grab" the USB device and then iTunes (running in OS X) won't recognize the device until you "unmount" it in Windows

5) Keyboard commands can be a bit confusing. For example, the "Command" key on the Apple keyboard maps to the "Windows" key on the guest operating system. This makes keyboard shortcuts maddening at times when you are trying to cut, copy, or paste back and forth between OS X applications and Windows applications.

6) Copying and pasting between host and guest OS works pretty well for text, but does not seem to work with OLE type objects or graphics. For example, if I am running NeoOffice on the Mac and Word under Windows I can copy a block of text from one to the other with predictable results. But if I highlight an image while in OS X, it does not paste into Word (but rather pastes the previous content of the clipboard.

7) Be wary of snapshots, and pay attention to the way vmware stores its files. You will see massive hard disk usage if you are not careful. I was taking a lot of "snap shots" because of the early problems I had and suddenly realized that I was running out of drive space! (I previously had 60+ GB of space before installing Fusion). Each snapshot takes up to several GB and the installation of Fusion and Windows XP Pro takes another 20 to 40 GB. My advice, don't take more snapshots than you need unless you have LOTS of disk space. There does not appear to be a way to "move" snapshots to a different volume or to take them and store than on a remote volume, which I see as a significant shortcoming of the product that will hopefully be addressed one day.

8) Time Machine backups - make sure you go into Time Machine and "uninclude" the entire "Virtual Machines" folder under Documents. If you don't do this, you will be chewing up a huge amount of space on your Time Capsule drive.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars VMware Fusion, January 20, 2009

By	BlueOwl (Westfield, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

I just installed the VMware Fusion in my Macbook Pro (early 2008 edition). The installation went smoothly. Subsequently I installed Windows XP Home on the MBP and it was fairly easy also. Everything works beautifully. Three PC programs that I installed work perfectly. "Unity" puts a PC program in a Mac window. Great function by the designers. USB mouse also works perfectly. A USB external hard drive shows up nicely in the PC environment within Fusion. So far I am satisfy with this software.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Garbage, October 15, 2009

By	DJC-ROOT (USA) - See all my reviews

I have this program on two computers and I have found that it is a piece of garbage. It shuts down arbitrarily. Windows starts to shut down on its own and just locks. Attempts to shut it down on purpose often don't work and it becomes necessary to restart the computer in order to get it to start over. There has to be a better way!