I’m a Mac guy, but, as with many others, my position as an IT support person requires me to use Windows regularly (and know it inside and out, of course). As such, Parallels was a no-brainer when I got my MacBook Pro. When Parallels stopped working for me after installing the Mac OS X 10.5.1 update, and at that absolute worst time for me, when I needed my Windows system for some work I was doing right then, I had a choice. I had already been toying with the idea of playing with VMWare Fusion after reading some reviews, but nothing I had read was really pushing me over the edge to jump in and try it. Most of the reviews I were reading said that, yes, the performance was better in VMWare Fusion, but they were really neck and neck, all things considered. When Parallels stopped working, it became just as easy to download a trial of VMWare Fusion than to try an uninstall/reinstall of Parallels, so that’s what I did. The result for me was that I realized that the reviews I read were all wrong, and in a good way. The performance gain of VMWare is so noticeable that there’s almost no comparison. I can now boot my Boot Camp partition containing Windows Vista, and not have to wait 15 or so seconds to have enough available system resources for me to continue the work I was doing before. In addition, I can actually leave that Vista system running in the background constantly without having the noticeable drain on resources that was very apparent in Parallels. It’s just much smoother, seamless, and less of a drain on the main system.

There are a number of other small things I like about the VMWare product as well. I like the fact that the screen saver doesn’t activate while the VM is running (yes, I know I could have deactivated this myself, but its little touches like this that make a product better). One of the things before that had me really thinking about switching to VMWare Fusion was the ability to use the growing number of VMWare appliances, something that comes in handy as an IT support person. I like the fact that I have the ability to run 64 bit guest OSes. There are just a lot of features like this that really round out the product and make it a much better product for a serious user.

So, Parallels, you were first on the scene with a good product, but you’ve fallen behind. What happened? I tend to like to see the underdog win when possible, but you’ve lost the edge. As such, VMWare Fusion is my new friend, and I think we’re going to be pretty good friends.