Whether you choose Fusion or Parallels, you won't have a seamless dual-OS experience unless you install the guest tools in the guest system. In the case of my review, Parallels and Fusion both offered Word 2007 on the 'Open with…' menu when I right-clicked the file. Both environments provide a way to get to applications on the guest (the virtual machine) from the Mac desktop. You'll also need plenty of disk space, since each virtual guest machine you create takes multiple gigabytes of disk space.īecause the integrated experience is an important selling point of Fusion and Parallels, I wrote this review with both Office 2007 on Windows and Office 2008 on the Mac using a single document and shared folders, using both Parallels and Fusion. I have 4GB of memory - abundant RAM is a must-have for a good experience with either product. I tested both packages on my MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running OS X 10.5.5). Fusion sports a completely redesigned, Cocoa-native interface and preference pane that makes it a more natural fit in the Mac environment. Parallels now supports SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) and 64-bit operating systems. The biggest change in these platforms since my last review is that both vendors have filled in glaring holes. That said, there are differences between them, and depending on your exact needs, you might find one a better choice than the other. Both systems offer easy Windows install, and both support even the most taxing Windows applications with aplomb. The most important thing about both of these products is what hasn't changed: Pick either one, and you'll get a solid performer that lets you run Windows or Linux on your Mac.

They provide what's called a hypervisor, which can host multiple guest OSes running at the same time. Both Fusion, now in Version 2.0.1, and Parallels, in Version 4.0, allow you to run another OS - Windows, Linux, and others - on your Mac as a guest of OS X. Since then, both products have undergone major revisions, so I thought I'd see how this horse race is coming along. A little more than a year ago, I reviewed VMware's Fusion 1.0 and Parallels Desktop 3.0 to see how they stacked up.

Mac parallels vs vmware vs bootcamp