Parallels or fusion

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just curious which would be better to run on a macbook air for running windows 7 32 bit.
 
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I would go for Bootcamp, although it really depends on how you want to operate it. If you are fine with rebooting into OSX or Windows 7 then that is the best (resources wise) way to go about it. Plus this way there is no other expense to virtualisation like Parallels.

Hope this helps.

- Simon
 

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just curious which would be better to run on a macbook air for running windows 7 32 bit.

Either one would be fine. I happen to like Fusion better but that's just me. They both have trial versions which you can download and test with. Also, don't overlook the free Oracle VirtualBox. Not as full featured as the other two but it does the job.
 
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+1 for Fusion
 

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I agree, Fusion is more stable (at least in my experience). Also, much better Linux support.

VMWare is the forerunner of virtualization technologies and their products tend to be very mature and well sorted out at release. This differs significantly from Parallels who seem to release new versions with beta-level stability.
 

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Another Fusion user here, although, I don't find too much to get me to use Windows on my Mac.
 
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Also Fusion seems to run sales pretty often so if you keep you eyes open you can get it much cheaper than the normal price.
 
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just curious which would be better to run on a macbook air for running windows 7 32 bit.

I haven't see any comparison tests using Windows 7 yet, but here is a comparison test with Vista:

Fusion vs. Parallels Benchmarks
Head-to-Head: Parallels Desktop for Mac vs. VMware Fusion

Macworld magazine published an online article comparing options:
Choosing a virtualization application | Software | Editors' Notes | Macworld

Another comparison article:
A Review of Software to Run Windows on a Mac - WSJ.com

How to choose which virtualization program to go with:
Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide

I own Parallels, and I can tell you that their support is abysmal. But the product's performance and ease of use once you get things sorted out, are excellent.

A very similar free option that you might want to try first:

Sun's VirtualBox (Free)
VirtualBox

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
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cool thanks guys. paralles said on their site version 6 was faster in 80% of the operations tested on fusion or something like that.

I am running bootcamp but would like to run win 7 within osx. I will look at fusion though since it seems to be popular and read those articles.
 

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cool thanks guys. paralles said on their site version 6 was faster in 80% of the operations tested on fusion or something like that.

Parallels' marketing frequently does that, mostly because it's very difficult to quantify and it's an easy sell for the gullible.
 
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I use Parallels. I find it fine for my needs, but their support is absolutely woeful to the point of embarrassment.

With a MacBook Air (and 2GBs of RAM I assume) you'll really struggle to run Vista or Win7 in a virtual machine and do anything useful. You might want to consider XP with that setup, or just use bootcamp.
 
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cool thanks guys. paralles said on their site version 6 was faster in 80% of the operations tested on fusion or something like that.

I am running bootcamp but would like to run win 7 within osx. I will look at fusion though since it seems to be popular and read those articles.

Parelells is full of it, they make claims like that all the time. To be honest, I've used both Fusion and Parallels and ultimately, they're both pretty close in performance.

Where it makes a difference is that I find Fusion's support and support community about 300% better than Parallels. Parallels also gouges customers on their frequent version upgrade costs at least in relation to what I've seen from Fusion so far.

So ultimately, technically they're very similar. It's the support and company philosophies I think that make the difference.
 
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+1 to Fusion here but I'm just about to celebrate being able to remove both Fusion and Windows as I've finally managed to find everything I wanted in the mac world - thank you iBank and Reunion.
 
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Interesting read. Thanks to Randy Singer for the Links too.

I'm looking to run either Parallels or Fusion on my Core 13 iMac when it arrives. Don't want to mess with BootCamp since I'm really only looking to do some light gaming on the thing and I like the idea of having Windows in a Window on the Mac Desktop.

I'm leaning towards Fusion right now and the games I'm looking at are not top of the line CPU or GPU intensive games (that's what the X-Bosx and PS3 are for), they are mostly 7 or 8 year old games that have been reissued and will run on Win 95-XP (One that I just found is one of the Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends series). Speaking of which I'm looking at installing a retail version of XP Home Edition on whichever one I end up purchasing.

All that being said, is there going to be any real difference between Parallels and Fusion for what I am looking to do? Both retail for about $70 locally.
 

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Keep your eye out for a Fusion special. I purchased Fusion 3.X about 3 months ago for $9.99 while it was on sale. They frequently have promotion sales and specials which I have yet to see from Parallels.

Also, if you're going to just be running some older Windows games that are not particularly graphic intensive, VirtualBox from Oracle might work well enough. You can't beat the price.
 
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For example, Fusion is running a V-Day sale right now, you can get it for $29.99

VMware
 
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Ive used both vmware fusion and parallels and personally I find fusion a superior product in almost every way, especially where it matters which is in general performance and stability. Im on a Mac Pro (early 2008) with 4gb ram and I run Windows XP Pro under vmware almost constantly. With only 4gb I find it a struggle to run Windows Vista or 7 and be able to do anything worthwhile with it and still run all my mac apps. But XP performance is generally excellent. Fusion has been very stable for me, no hickups at all. I run various older games under it without issue, I even run an old version of MS Virtual PC under my WinXP VM for some ultra-ancient DOS stuff which runs remarkably well considering its a VM within a VM lol. It should also be noted that Fusion works very well indeed with dual-monitors and Windows recognises the fact I have two monitors just as it would on real hardware. This combined with OSX's Spaces feature is fantastic.

As for Parallels to be honest I've never found it very impressive. It does have some nice handy features which Fusion is missing, such as some fairly comprehensive integration with the Windows and Mac side and mounting of virtual drives etc. If thats essential for you then Parallels may be worth a look. But if performance and most importantly stability is what you need, then Fusion is the way to go. And as someone else mentioned, it has excellent Linux and alternative OS support. Parallels rather oddly caused some minor performance issues on my system on the mac side when running the VM, which I never witnessed with Fusion. Also Parallels seems to get worse stability wise from release to release and as others have said, good luck getting proper support from them, they don't seem to care much. I also had issues with dual-monitor support on Parallels and WinXP.. it would use both monitors but instead of Windows recognising them as discreet monitors as it would on real hardware, it simply saw it as one big monitor and thus one big desktop spanning both my physical monitors. Odd.

Anyway thats a rather lengthy way of saying, Fusion is better :p But try both, see which you prefer.
 
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For example, Fusion is running a V-Day sale right now, you can get it for $29.99

VMware

Thanks schweb. I just purchased it!

EDIT: I got the rebate. What I don't get is the $29.99 price. $79.99 - $30.00 = $49.99. Still a good price but....
 
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All that being said, is there going to be any real difference between Parallels and Fusion for what I am looking to do? Both retail for about $70 locally.

That's hard to say. Both Parallels and Fusion only have partial implementation of DirectX. You may want to have a look at both of their Web sites, and their associated discussion forums, and see if any of their users use the games that you want to run specifically, so that you know that they will run okay.

My son wanted to run Windows on his iMac for no other reason than to run animated games, and eventually he got fed up with Parallels and switched to using Bootcamp. Bootcamp worked flawlessly. I think that is the way to go if your only interest is gaming. Restarting your Mac to play games isn't that big of a deal. Besides, Bootcamp is free:

Apple - Support - Boot Camp

Don't forget to install any updates to Bootcamp:
Apple - Support - Downloads

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________
 

lrd


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Never tried Parallels but Fusion 3 does everything I need. I use the Windows version of Office (MUST HAVE MACRO SUPPORT!!) and it runs seamlessly inside of OS X. IN fact, I can put it in unity mode and have the Win7 task bar AND the OSX dock both showing at the same time. Pretty cool...

That said, I had to upgrade my MBP to 8GB or it crawled to a stop...maybe because I was running Win7 Ult x64??
 

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