Comments on: Parallels Desktop 5 vs. VMWare Fusion 3

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:05:57 +0000

It turns out that VMware is quite more stable in terms of kernel extension implementation than Parallels. Your remarks to the stability are perfectly within reason and are the rule. I wish Parallels would get on the ball and stop being so hackish.

By: Don

Don — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:20:35 +0000

Thanks for the great info! I ran this question by Skeeter over at mac village, and would greatly appreciate your take.

Which VM would do best for a slower machine running productivity apps rather than games? I’m running the latest Macbook Air, which tops out at 2GHZ duo and 2GB Ram. I don’t plan on doing any graphics work besides basic maps (GIS) and Microsoft Office. I’d do boot camp, but the clunky file-sharing options with that seem prohibitive.

Any advice?

Don

By: WC

WC — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 05:17:21 +0000

Can you think of any reason why Fusion 2.06 stops showing apps in the dock? Or why everytime I try to run Fusion 3.0 it hangs while starting up? Or where one might actually get live tech support for Fusion?

By: Parallels 5 vs VMWare fusion 3 for the visual studio developper, compilation benchs | Everything and the Mobile Software Universe...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:15:11 +0000

[...] has a good head to head fusion v3 vs Parallels 5 comparison also: He prefers VMWare for dev… I don’t due to the size of our projects, I’m [...]

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:27:30 +0000

For the Visual C++ dev, I’ve made some compilation bench between the 2 … conclusion is obvious:-) http://tmenguy.free.fr/TechBlog/?p=481

By: TwiRp

TwiRp — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:03:50 +0000

My issue with that is I can’t find an option to hide it when Parallels isn’t running.

By: TwiRp

TwiRp — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:03:19 +0000

I have an iMac (2.66 GHz, 4 GB ram) and the black macBook (2.16 GHz, 2 GB ram).

Parallels Desktop 5 is faster on boot and feels a lot smoother as it runs, but it does take up more background processes about 15% with Vista, while VMWare Fusion only takes about 5% with Vista. I don’t use the boot camp partition in either of them. I’ve never tried that start-up thing you’re talking about.

Parallels crashes on my when I use Aero and switch between the different view modes. It also crashes sometimes when sharing files. Fusion doesn’t crash as often. Changing view modes is fine (although Parallels does look nicer in my opinion), and if there’s a problem sharing a file, it just doesn’t load the file.

I’m not too picky about the clipboard, but I have noticed some limitations.

By: ashley

ashley — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:32:51 +0000

Hello,

I was wondering what specifically have you enjoyed about Parallels gaming? If you could e-mail me back that would be great.

Cheers.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:19:44 +0000

What kinds of machine are you running? I have not had any Parallels or Fusion crashes. Right now I am running P4 on a Black MacBook to access my BootCamp partition. While F3 offers a few nicer integration features, the admin password requirement is really annoying. This is not required by P4 or P5. I compared P4 to F3 on a boot race and it seems that P4 was marginally faster. I ran into several problems with F3 refusing to automatically load a shared file once it opened. What I did was put a word document from the shared folder in to my Windows startup folder and hit start on the Virtual machine. I then timed how long it took to reach the working point. Most of the time F3 never made it.

Despite their claims, neither program P5 or F3 provide a true shared clipboard, which is an upgrade deal breaker for me because that is my main complaint with P4.

By: Alex Frost

Alex Frost — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:36:58 +0000

About Office compatibility. Fusion 3 has a copy-paste buffer limitation. It is limited to 4 MB only. It is not enough to exchange pictures.