Which Virtual Machine software to go with?

Hay All,

Got my Macbook Pro before christmas and Im loving it
One question I have is that Im currently running Windows XP Home in Boot Camp which is working a treat however sometimes I would like to use XP from the comfort of the Mac OS, only reason being is then I have access to my tunes, while booting into XP is great especially to play games but when work interrupts (which is the main reason I bought this thing) I would like to use Office (Vision/Project) from Mac OS and of course listen to my music.

Does any of the VM software work on the XP partition that I already have installed or will I have to create another partition just for use with the VM?

Also which are the best (parallels is what I see the most) and are their any free types available? I'm guessing no?

Thanks

Z

Okay download trial of parallels and well Im pretty impressed except for 1 aspect and that is that windows now wants me to reregister my copy of windows as the hardware specifications have changed.
Has anybody got a work around for this?
Their is no way Im paying for another key

Personally I prefer VMWare, it's more stable than Parallels. And Parallels support is abysmal. As for the key issue, you can't run Windows on more than one machine, VM or otherwise.

zoli said:

Okay download trial of parallels and well Im pretty impressed except for 1 aspect and that is that windows now wants me to reregister my copy of windows as the hardware specifications have changed.
Has anybody got a work around for this?
Their is no way Im paying for another key

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Yep, that will happen. Virtual Machine hardware specs will be different than your Physical Machine hardware specs. That has nothing to do with Parallels at all.

I use VMware and love it. I have not used Parallels.

VMware is by far the better piece of software. Don't even bother with Parallels.

Dawson said:

VMware is by far the better piece of software. Don't even bother with Parallels.

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Why so? I'm not contesting... I just don't know much about Parallels.

giulio said:

Why so? I'm not contesting... I just don't know much about Parallels.

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I found it unstable, and would happily corrupt the drive images of VMs. Posting support questions on their forum - which was not linked to directly on their site - produced no response from them at all, no matter how serious the issue. I don't know, or care, if newer versions are any more reliable.

VMWare has been flawless for me since day one, I consider Parallels to be a waste of money. It's annoying to see it in Apple stores when it's an inferior product.

Wow. Well. I bought VMware because... it was the first one I tried. Guess I lucked out!

giulio said:

Wow. Well. I bought VMware because... it was the first one I tried. Guess I lucked out!

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You did - I bought Parallels because it was the first one I tried!

I have had no problems at all with Parallels. It works well in coherence mode which is great. Means i can play my fave poker site and work at the same time.

As for windows. If you installed Windows xp on the boot camp partition then once you hve installed it via your virtual machine [parallels or VMware] you will have to re-activate it. But this is a painless process by phone if you have your documentation. You don't have to talk to a person. just make sure you confirm you are installing it on the same machine.

I had a hard drive failure on my windows machine that meant I've done this three times now while messing with raid configurations.

what documentation do I need? just serial key?

I use Parallels, not by choice really, but because I got it as a special promo for free when I bought my iMac. Is it worth it to switch to VMware? If so, why? Convince me? And by the way, I only use Windows for 1 program.

saxnbass said:

I use Parallels, not by choice really, but because I got it as a special promo for free when I bought my iMac. Is it worth it to switch to VMware? If so, why? Convince me? And by the way, I only use Windows for 1 program.

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Just go and download the VMWare Fusion demo.

I saw some good reviews of VMware Fusion and downloaded the demo. Easy to install and performed flawlessly (almost - see end) so I bought the product (Amazon had the best price at the time). Running XP and using MS Money, Word, Excel (the latter two only when I have to send docs out to Win users), Personal Ancestry File (Genealogy app) and best of all it allows me to use my Canon D660U Scanner which is unsupported on my mac.

Still haven't sussed how to print from XP and have to save docs to my mac desktop and print from there which is a bit of a pain but only a bit as I don't need to do that very often. I did get to print from XP but got an extra blank page followed by an error message on another page which I worked around by printing only specific pages not the whole doc. However, on returning to OSX found that my mac would not communicate with my printers so I'm now back to square one on that front. I'll raise a new thread on the site in due course if VMWare support cannot resolve.

I've used Parallels to run Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and OpenBSD. I haven't had any serious issues. I'd say I'm happy with Parallels so far.

Business Objects services starting in 2003 seem to have a timeout issue, but eventually start up. I also had an odd understanding about starting the VM and opening the images. Can't really explain that one.

I tried to get an OpenStep image created, but was unsuccessful.

Sawday said:

I did get to print from XP but got an extra blank page followed by an error message on another page which I worked around by printing only specific pages not the whole doc. However, on returning to OSX found that my mac would not communicate with my printers so I'm now back to square one on that front. I'll raise a new thread on the site in due course if VMWare support cannot resolve.

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Did you install the printer and driver in XP? I was able to do so, and can print to the same printer from either XP or Mac.

giulio said:

Did you install the printer and driver in XP? I was able to do so, and can print to the same printer from either XP or Mac.

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Hi giulio. Actually I followed the VMware tutorial which involved installing Bonjour, sharing the printer, setting the network mode to 'bridged' then setting IP config to 'release' and then 'renew'... which all seemed rather complicated. Your screen shots were most helpful so although I tried something like this originally, I don't remember inputting the IP address anywhere so I'll try again this weekend. Thanks for the tip - I'll report back if it works.

I am currently running Parallels, just upgraded to 3.0. It has been a little buggy, but all seems fine now. I have a network attached printer and I had to install the software in Windows and Mac. They both work perfectly.

My question to the rest is this. If Fusion is that much better than Parallels maybe I should switch. If I do will I lose my current VM? I would not want to have to reinstall everything if I can avoid it.