Fusion vs. Parallels: The Mossberg View
I feel like I've been doing this too much lately, but I need to apologize again for the scarcity of my blogging lately. For the last couple of weeks, it was print magazine deadlines. More recently, it was another college visitation roadtrip with my daughter April, who's deep in the midst of trying to pick a school. This last trip was to a college in Indiana, about an 11-hour trip from our home in north-central Maryland.
The best thing about the trip, other than spending serious quality time with my daughter? My iPhone and its GPS capabilities. I'm a pretty serious iPhone addict now, and this trip further cemented my standing as a Steve Jobs fanboy. I got a windshield mount for my car, plugged the phone into the cigarette lighter with an adapter, and let it guide me all the way there. Worked fantastic, except for a few minutes when I lost signal. It was truly a revelation (you listening, Tom?)
Anyway, back to some virtualization stuff. Walt Mossberg over at the Wall Street Journal recently published a review of VMware Fusion, and compares it with Parallels. His conclusion?
"In my view, Fusion is now the better choice for running Windows on a Mac virtually."
That doesn't mean he didn't like Parallels, because he did. He just thought Fusion edged it out in some areas like speed, better snapshot management and superior graphics capabilities.
I'm a Fusion user as well (on my dual-core Intel MacBook Pro), and agree with his assessment of Fusion's capabilities. I have the latest version, 2.0, and it works very well. The interface is improved, but I haven't seen much in the way of performance improvements.
(A side note here about Windows operating systems: I have Windows XP installed in a VM, and it works great. I had Vista installed, too, but deleted it, because it slowed my computer to a crawl. Interestingly, the same thing happens with my kids' computer, a PC with Virtual PC installed -- XP runs fine in a VM, Vista makes me feel like I'm on the D.C. Beltway in rush hour.)
What's your take on Fusion vs. Parallels? Let me know.
Posted by Keith Ward on 10/09/2008 at 12:48 PM