I've had Parallels since the early betas in the spring last year, an enthusiastic supporter, and purchaser prerelease, and upgrader to 3. But I'm writing this in a Fusion Win Vista IE7. The Fusion is a trial version--haven't bought it yet. I guess what I want to ask is, Has something gone horribly wrong with Parallels? They had this huge lead for a VM machine for the Intel machines. Now, reading these msg boards, it sounds like the current version of Parallels is NOTHING but trouble. What I'm looking for is an even-handed, comprehensive comparison review between the two products. Or, in the best case, several of these. It's not really useful to hear that this guy has Problem A and this guy has Problem B and so on. We have no control, no way of knowing where the problems reside, etc. Generally, the Fusion forums seem fonder of that product than these forums of the current Parallels product. But maybe there are more users here, or more chronic complainers. Who knows? Where can I find thorough comparison reviews? Does anyone have links to same, or, for that matter, to ANY 3rd party reviews of the two VM programs? Thanks.
Since you are a long time Parallels user, the comparison should be pretty quick and easy to do. VMWare is more basic (less functionnalities - which is not bad if you don't need them), lighter on the host when the virtual machine is mainly quiet (at the expense of the VMs being slightly slower when under charge - don't take my words, test it, measure it). If you're looking to run 3D games, neither parallels or vmware are ready to handle them nicely enough for most people for now. Vmware has had some visual goodies which Parallels is busy adding too, though I hope both products will offer a way to NOT treat VM Windows windows as Exposé windows (that is slower and not much appropriate with some windows application creating a lot of transient small windows). Both products are priced equally (temporary promotions excluded). I must admit I have used vmware much less than Parallels and that for now, I only boot vmware to test and compare some details from time to time.
The only reason you don't see many complaints on the Fusion forums is that not many people have actually paid for it yet. Those that have paid, have gotten a sweet discount. People tend to complain more when they pay money for something that doesn't work. If I were a beta tester for something, you won't see me complain much simply because I would take the non-functional aspects of the application as somewhat of a work in progress. When you pay for something, you expect it to work. Fusion hasn't reached that state yet. Give it time, you'll see more grumpy people there than on here.
