Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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76 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Windows Under Glass, November 21, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Overview:
App Performance: A+
VM states suspend and resume seamlessly and quickly.
Windows Performance:A+
The windows users in my office are using fairly new PCs and laptops, but with crappy graphics cards. My Macbook Pro (early 2007 version) runs windows "faster" than any version of windows in the office. Is it really faster? There's no way to know without running benchmarks, but it seems faster, and that's something.
Interface: A -
Accessibility to Windows and Windows apps is simple, as are installation and configuration utilities. Windows apps are still bound to a single screen when using spaces - even in 'unity' mode. This is a major gripe I have with VMs in general, as I use multiple work spaces. For those who use a single screen, or who run the VM in a dedicate screen 'space', this isn't a problem. It keeps me out of 'unity' mode and in full screen though.
Mac/PC sharing: A
Your home folder on your Mac shows up as an attached drive (Z:), making navigation to mac directories and files simple and easy (and fast!)
Networking: A+
Fast networking, with setup so easy I almost forgot to review it :-)
Overall: A+
Details:
I'm a long-time Windows-on-Mac user, starting back in the day of Virtual PC, and most recently using Parallels (I currently use Parallels v3.0). I want to start this review by saying that, for many casual PC users looking to run Windows on a Mac, there probably isn't a need -- most everything I do day to day (at work and home) can be done on either OS, and if you own mac hardware, you'll be happier running Mac apps as well. UNLESS you have that "one application" that isn't supported natively.
In my office, we:
1. use Microsoft exchange for email and scheduling, and so I needed to run Windows
2. use one of those large printer/copier/scanner/collating/faxing monstrosities, and it lacks a working mac driver
Of course, there's a slew of word and powerpoint files to deal with as well, but these can be handled with Office for Mac or OpenOffice. Of course, once running Windows anyway for the two reasons above, I prefer to use native Office apps, because that way I'm 100% the files will be compatible (and plus, I end up having to open them on the Windows side to print them anyway).
My initial impressions of VMware Fusion 2 were very positive. It was easy to install, and the interface is very clean. While it's not 100% fair to compare VMware Fusion 2 to the older version of Parallels 3.0 in terms of performance, it is fair to compare things like interface and usability -- and in these areas, VMware wins, in my opinion. I'll give the blanket caveat up front: Parallels may have fixed some of these things in newer versions ... I'll try to get a copy of Parallels v4.0 and do a follow-up review.
VMware's 'unity' puts windows apps side by side with Mac apps (much like Parallel's 'Coherence'). When in 'unity' mode, you have the option to show the windows task bar, which plunks the ugly windows bar behind the Mac's dock. My dock fills the center 70% of my screen, so the Start Menu and the goofy windows tool tray are nice and visible on the far-left and far-right of the screen. However, because I use virtual screens (Mac's "spaces" feature), and because VMware is bound to one of those screens, I run in full-screen mode -- if I have to switch spaces to get to my PC apps anyway, I don't want the ugly conflict between taskbar & dock.
Networking was so clean I almost forgot to include it in this review: it just worked, piggy-backing my Mac's network connections without requiring any action on my part. Digging in, it offers direct network connections as well as private networking (the PC is only available to the Mac). Nice options, but what's even nicer is I didn't even notice they were there.
Performance is amazing for a VM ... even before enabling access to both processors and boosting the default 512MB of memory to 1GB. The only slow-down on the Mac side occurs during a windows boot (or re-boot as is more often the case) ... otherwise, Windows can sit, used or ignored, running on the mac without any noticeable performance degradation to Mac apps.
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69 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fusion, Not Parallels, Is The Way To Go, A Critical Review, November 15, 2008
I am a Mac owner and a former PC owner--Compaq. I have quite a few PC software that would be very expensive to replace because of the difference between the Mac OS and Windows.
So what to do?
A few years ago when I was saving up to make the switch, there was only one software available--"Virtual PC"--then, Microsoft bought them out. Then, came word that several private companies were working on their own virtual software. Parallels Desktop for Mac came out and then came news of the Wine project-- a group of engineers whom pooled their resources to develop a kind of "anti-operating system" if you would. Once installed, many Windows based software would automatically install itself on the Mac (or Linux) operating system, thus bypassing the need to buy a Windows operation system or re-purchase the software for the different platform. One of the contributors to the Wine Project, Codeweavers developed their own brand of Wine, called "CrossOver For Mac,"with modifications and some improvements over the collective project.
I decided that I needed to get Parallels because I couldn't get my Sprint wireless card to adapt to the Mac OS. I forked over $70 plus $125 for Windows XP Home. I told myself $200 is a whole lot better than buying another PC laptop. Everything went fine for several months. Then it didn't. After about 4 months, Parallels stopped working. It would either freeze constantly or crash. Other reviewers have called it "the blue screen of death," and that's exactly the best way to describe it. I had to constantly reset the program. Nothing seemed to reduce the frequency of it stalling. I had to uninstall and re-install it only to repeat this feature every two (2) weeks. With it now being out-of-warranty, it now would have cost me more to talk on the phone with a rep for two hours than it cost me to buy the product. By email, it was on average a three day wait for a response. In the meantime, I bought CrossOver and used it for my Word, and Excel projects--it was (is) considerably slower but it got the job done.
I uninstalled Parallels for good and sold my copy for a fraction of the cost, but it relieved me of seeing that horrendous program on the icon bar.
Now to Fusion. I downloaded Fusion 1x and immediately after putting all of my Windows software on, including the King-Of-Eating-Up-Valuable-Harddrive Space....Photoshop, the software was up and running without fuss in less than 60 seconds. Until last week, the only way to watch free archival Netflix movies was to have the Windows OS, Fusion allowed me to watch literally dozens of movies over the course of several weekends as easy as turning on the tv. Because I bought Fusion within a period a few weeks before they introduced Fusion2, I upgraded at no extra cost.
Speed, reliability and Fusion is actually $15 cheaper, new, than Parallels if you pick it up here. It is now the same amount of time that I've had Fusion when Parallels started to malfunction and deteriorate. It has never had even a minor glitch.
Fusion is by far the superior program to Parallels, if you want to have access to Windows on your Mac.
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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Smooth and the program gives access to PC programs, October 21, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
My daughter, the resident techno geek, installed the VMware Fusion 2 virtual machine program on our iMac yesterday. After installation she played Guild Wars and Oblivion using the virtual machine. Guild Wars ran fairly well and both the audio and video was smooth. Oblivion, which is a memory hog, didn't fare so well. It crashed the virtual machine. So it was a no go for Oblivion.
Today, I fired up the VMware Fusion 2 virtual machine and used it to run Mastercook. I love Mastercook and was sad to quit using the program as it does not run on a Mac. Low and behold, I was up and running Mastercook through the virtual machine. The program ran smoothly, relatively quickly, and I was so pleased to have my old friend back.
Our Mac runs at 2.16 ghz and has 1 GB memory. By the way, our Mac is a Intell Core 2 Duo machine.
Also, the virtual machine accessed Boot Camp on the partition, for all the Mac geeks who are interested. The partition access was done automatically.
We have used both Parallels and VMware Fusion 2 and we much prefer the Vmware Fusion 2 program.
Overall, we are very pleased with this software. It was very easy to install, as my daughter says it was a couple clicks, and she was done.
Note: Yesterday I ran into a minor problem using the VMware Fusion 2 virtual machine. I tried to print out sewing patterns using the virtual machine. The sewing pattern pieces did not print correctly using the virtual machine. I had to print the patterns directly through Boot Camp.
I am still very pleased with the ease of use with this software program. It is rare that I have to go to the "dark side" but when I do the VMware Fusion 2 makes the swap easy.
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