Since I purchased my iMac a year and a half ago, I’ve been a solid Parallels fan, until yesterday. After reading Danny Sullivans post on his experience with VMWare I decided to give it a shot.
Installation, I still have to give Parallels props on, installing windows is far more advanced with Parallels than VMWare, but despite the installation portion of my experience, VMWare is superior to Parallels. Start up with VMWare is faster, and running in unity mode is a dream, unlike Parallels which was very sluggish and almost every program took quite a bit of time to start up.
With VMWare, I’m able to play my usual games at Shockwave.com with only the minimalization where VMWare like Parallels reduce the window size to around 800 pixels wide vs utilizing my full desktop. I’m sure I’ll find a solution to this, as I prefer to play games with a larger screen resolution.
parallels runs xp a lot faster for me.. AND i can run dual monitors
I have both Parallels and VM Ware installed – and I have to say Parallels does the dual monitors unlike VM Ware. But I’m on a 24″ iMac so Dual Monitors is a bit redundant.
For myself, VM Ware allows me to play my Windows 3D games quite easily on unity without wasting resources. I like that I can assign a single core and run at 512 mb memory – again, no lag and no distortions.
I’m also a bit perturbed by Parallels constant updates, where VM Ware has been stable since I installed.
what? i guess ive never looked at updates as a bad thing? those games you play.. they dont get updates? updates usually means upgrading.. not downgrading.. vmware doesnt update their software because they dont care about it.. what youre running is going to be ancient in 6 months
Despite that it’s ancient, it’s still running faster than Parallels on my machine. If it did not keep up with my needs, I would switch – but so far, I’ve had no problems and quite happy with it.