Once I managed to get Win 7 running on the Bootcamp partition it was time to consider how I might get access to Win 7 inside OSX. Over the past year there have been numerous online articles detailing the options. The first and oldest (as far as OSX is concerned anyway) being Parallels Desktop 5 and the 'new' kid on the block, VMware Fusion 3.

As always a few minutes (alright and hour or two...) spent reading reviews proved to be valuable and I downloaded the trial version of Fusion 3. I have used VMware on Windows and new that it was a solid product there, which was what most reviewers were also saying about the OSX version. While there are some definite

Parallels fans most were impressed with the 'speed' and 'slickness'. The visual integration of Parallels, at least from the online images certainly seems a bit more clever than Fusion, however those who had worked with both overwhelmingly returned to the same point, Fusion was rock steady reliable while Parallels had a regular habit of bellow flopping. Since this tools will be to provide reliable access to key work tools VMware won IMHO.

Firing Fusion 3 up I got right to work. The first surprise was that Fusion not only realised that I had a Bootcamp installation of Win 7 but also asked if I would like to set it up for virtual access. Sure why not... several minutes later I was booting into Win 7 exactly as if I had fired up the Bootcamp edition. I dragged the Fusion window over onto my secondary display and made it full-screen. Too Easy!

After a couple of days I decided that I owed it to myself to tryout the Parallels Desktop 5 solution and proceed to download and install it. Launching Parallels it too found my Bootcamp Win 7 and asked if I wanted to setup a virtual edition. As soon as I said yes the very next alert warned that I would need to reactivate Win 7. Hmmm... fail right there. I still need to be able to run Bootcamp Win 7 and I already had be forced to call MS to activate.

I also intend to tryout the VirtualBox open source GPL option from Sun/Oracle in the near future, probably after I upgrade the MBPro HDD to 500 gig. :-)

SPEED

While Fusion 3/Win 7 (Bootcamp) works just fine it is certainly not as fast as the native Bootcamp version. Which is not really a surprise it is just that reading the marketing hype I was expecting more... I guess it is always the same with marketing. In fairness somethings seem to work pretty well considering that they are using a virtual machine and it is only when you go back to native Win 7 that you realise the difference.

While Fireworks CS4 works just fine, even allowing drag and drop from OSX. Video playback with my favourite ZoomPlayer was a very jerky/stuttering affair - unwatchable but hey that was really expecting to much anyway right? However it seems that other have found video playback to work using Parallels and Win 32bit OS (my Win 7 Pro is 64bit).

I will have to try fully virtual Win XP to see how that works.

STABILITY

So far I have not had any issues with Fusion 3. I can say that it is much happier with 2 gig of RAM. In deed after resizing my partitions (subject of next article) I had to reset my Fusion BootCamp VM and forgot to increasewin the standard 1 gig.

One thing that does cause an issue relates to sleep/suspend/screen saver. There have been a couple of times when I have not been able to resume Win 7. However I am wondering if that might be an issue with Win 7 itself and hardware configuration as I have had a similar issue with the Bootcamp install also. Therefore I will reserve judgement until I have had the opportunity to do some further testing.

CONCLUSION

Virtualisation would seem to be a key future tech. Now if Apple would only grow up enough to acknowledge that they don't have the worlds only software/hardware solution we mght actually see a legal virtual OSX running inside Win 7... wait did I just see bacon outside my window??

While I have yet to give Parallels a full workout I can say that Fusion 3 has worked very well for me, allowing me full access to my installed BootCamp Win 7 Pro. This has already proved to be a productivity booster! Thanks VMware.