virtual pc software

dazza13 · 23 Mar 2009 at 21:58

Can you use vmware on macs I thought i'd heard about a mac versions of it or is their any thing else thats better very new to macs as it a few days want to be able to run xp for a few custom apps at my work.

Feek · 23 Mar 2009 at 22:20

VMWare Fusion or if you prefer a free solution then there's VirtualBox.

dazza13 · 23 Mar 2009 at 22:22

Thanks i'll look at those I have been doing a bit of poking around and seen a lot of talk about parallells is that worth looking at?

Feek · 23 Mar 2009 at 22:27

I preferred Fusion to Parallels personally.

geekyEd · 24 Mar 2009 at 01:14

I installed suse on virtualbox for a few weeks works very nicely to be honest, just like all vm software ive seen previously.

Vonhelmet · 24 Mar 2009 at 08:23

You need your machine to be fairly powerful or it can be quite slow. You may be better with boot camp.

Rambaud · 24 Mar 2009 at 08:25

I have Parallels and Fusion - but tend to use Parallels more of the time. Not tried VirtualBox.

Parallels 4 is likely to be faster than Fusion for most specs at the moment. That will probably change when Fusion issue an upgrade.

Try all 3 of them, and see which you prfer.

GraemeUK · 24 Mar 2009 at 08:38

I prefer VMware. Tried Parallels and Virtual Box but the latter gave me problems when XP was installed (various errors/crashes inside XP).

Will_3rd · 24 Mar 2009 at 09:29

Tried all three, prefer VMware and Virtual Box.

MagicBoy · 24 Mar 2009 at 13:29

Tried Parallels and Fusion. I prefer Parallels!

Maccy · 24 Mar 2009 at 13:41

Another Parallels fan

Slogan · 24 Mar 2009 at 16:14

Both Parallels and VmWare Fusion are good, I prefer the latter.

Tom84 · 24 Mar 2009 at 18:20

I like it how in Parallels you can have both Os's running simultaneously (the Mac bar at the top with the Windows one down the bottom)

From what I hear though VMFusion is the best for Mac's

tsinc80697 · 24 Mar 2009 at 21:25

VMWare at home and VirtualBox at work here

NickK · 24 Mar 2009 at 23:24

Just upgraded from Parallels 3 to 4 today. It's noticeably faster - although oddly the time to get form start to log on box is slower.

Slogan · 24 Mar 2009 at 23:43

Tom84 said:
I like it how in Parallels you can have both Os's running simultaneously (the Mac bar at the top with the Windows one down the bottom)

You can also have this in Fusion, goes under the Unity setting I believe - pretty nice how slick they managed to get it, Windows' apps look native.

Hate · 25 Mar 2009 at 08:50

about a year ago when I used them a lot (for development work) I preferred Parallels, but a year on I'm not up to speed on anything new that's on the table with them.

MacRS4 · 25 Mar 2009 at 10:37

I use both Parallels and Fusion, but for slightly differing purposes. I find parallels better for virtualising a machine to use for things like your normal windows apps (Like office and the like) so I tend to use that as my 'Windows' desktop.

VMWare is far better though at running multiple OS at the same time, such as Windows Servers etc. I tend to do a lot of testing where I may have say 3 x Windows 2003 boxes running with SQL, Exchange and say OCS. That works pretty well with VMWare but really struggles with Parallels.

The integration with parallels (Coherence etc.) seems to work better than the VMWare equivalent.

keogh · 29 Mar 2009 at 12:25

Parallels threw every type of BSOD and error you could imagine at me when installing XP a long time a go, chucked that and used VMWare Fusion, and had not 1 single problem since, so Fusion all the way!

Feek · 29 Mar 2009 at 13:46

My experience with Parallels was similar, that's why I prefer VMWare Fusion. I might give it another try though as there's been a major release since I looked at it.