IanW

That will let me run windows in a 'unity' mode on my MBP.

Markus

Two main ones, Parallels and VMWare's Fusion.

You'll see on the other Mac thread that David is having a niggle with Parallels, so that might put you off.

My 2 cents worth? Go with Fusion. I do like Parallels and used it since the very first beta version came out and it worked well for me. I've run XP, 2000 Server, 2003 Server, SLES9, SLES10, Fedora, and Ubuntu through it and it's great. The 2003 setup was even an AD setup, and it allowed me to bind my Macs via AD to it.

The one OS it did not and still does not support, and one I needed to test with was Novell Netware. Fusion supports all the other OSes I needed plus Netware, and so I downloaded a copy of it, tried it and again, works perfectly.

The only niggles I've ever had have been the "VMWare Tools" installation on *nix systems, it's not as simple as on Windows, where you simply double-click something, you need to issue a few commands from the shell, nothing overly complex, but a package of some sort would have been nice.

So, for me, Fusion wins it at present.

RichB

I use VMWare3 with XP on SnowLeopard, works ok but I only use it to test sites in IE...

ptholt

VirtualBox is free and works on mac and pc, could be worth a go.

Trout

iTrader: (1)

Markus is right - under Snow Leopard I have had a niggle that sometimes when opening the VM it actually deletes the current one and creates a new one. Annoying but it still works.

Once it is running it is excellent. Select coherence mode and Windows and Mac both run as if they are native on the machine. Totally shared file structures, desktop and devices. If a device has to be tethered to the Mac or Windoze machine Parallels will ask you to choose.

I have attached a couple of screen shots - the first to demonstrate both Mac and Windoze menus...

and the second in coherence mode - you get both machines on the desktop.

Also Parallels allows you to specify associations with app in windows in files that may be stored on your 'mac'. When you open these it will automatically start the VM and open it with the correct windows app - e.g. word, ppt or excel.

I have not used Fusion so cannot compare. Parallels has been stable (once running in SL), performant and very effective for me. I use my machine for work and play!






See Markus - once a fanboy always a fanboy