Rich Mintz  

On my old computer, I had Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac, and on my new one I have Windows XP running under VMWare Fusion 3.

I’m only an occasional Windows user, so I don’t want to have to configure it or tune it — I just want it to work. And on that criterion, Fusion is kicking Parallels’ behind.

Under Parallels, I very often had window freezes, Windows freezes, annoying display glitches (“don’t move the mouse too far over there, or everything will go haywire”); I had trouble figuring out what resolution was right for my applications and getting it to work; “suspend” mode almost never worked properly; and so on.

Under VMWare: install VMWare, install WIndows (both completely painless), install apps, launch everything, and it Just Works. I don’t know anything about how to configure or tune VMWare because I haven’t yet needed to learn anything. (In contrast, I had to learn a bunch of stuff about Parallels, which hopefully I’ll never need to use again.)

What I like best: I can keep my Windows applications running, put VMWare into Suspend mode, and forget about it for 3 hours or 3 days; when I wake it up again, state is exactly restored and things resume where they were.

I note that I’ve upgraded (somewhat) in processor speed and (significantly) in memory, but my old machine was pretty high-powered for two years ago. And on that machine, even on a clean restart with no other apps running, Windows under Parallels was pretty rickety.

Tags: technofoolery

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