What about the important stuff? What about performance? Reliability? I personally like VM Ware’s execution of this feature. The difference is simply a matter of personal preference, as the functionality is exactly the same. In Parallels, the Windows start menu and whole lower menu bar show up right on your Mac desktop. While in Unity mode, there is a menu item for Applications, which works like the start menu in Windows, only a little better. This isn’t a big deal in an of itself, but the implication is the graphics are somewhat choppy coming across the OS boundary. In Unity mode, Cohesion in Parallels, my favorite windows app, RocketDock, looks very pixelated and is pretty chopped up.
Neither VM application will let me use the extra buttons on my MS Explorer track ball, because they both emulate a PS2 mouse driver to connect through to the mouse. It would be nice if either vendor would make a Mac VM out of the PC one by simply operating on the VHD file, but not at this time. This is my most frequent way to get a VM onto my Mac, create one from a pre-existing physical box or a Virtual PC VM. Parallels also has an application that does this, an both work the same way. For that, you must download a different application, which installs on the machine you want to turn into a VM for Fusion and it builds itself. That said, the importer application will not create a Fusion VM from a Windows Virtual PC VHD, which is what I wish it would do. I simply pointed the Importer application at my Parallels VM and 30 minutes later it had made the VMware PC I am using as I write this post in Live Writer. So, I am running both VMware and Parallels on the same VM. What happened is that within a few hours of posting, a representative of VMware contacted me and gave me a free license to their Fusion product, a virtual machine client for the Mac. In the spirit of full disclosure, this post is a direct result of a previous post I made on falling back in love with my MacBook Pro. By: David Starr Category:Uncategorized Tag: Apple, Reviews, Tools and Utilities: