Software : VMware Fusion 2

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from: Smith Micro Software Inc.

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Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Smith Micro Software Inc.
EAN: 0717103883675
Format: CD-ROM
Label: Smith Micro Software Inc.
Manufacturer: Smith Micro Software Inc.
Model: VMFM20BX2
Platform: Mac OS X Intel
Publisher: Smith Micro Software Inc.
Release Date: October 05, 2008
Sales Rank: 25
Studio: Smith Micro Software Inc.

Features:

Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting
Run Windows applications across multiple screens; instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock and more
Use Exposé to switch between Windows and Mac applications; minimize Windows applications to the Dock
Run 3D games, design software and other graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D hardware-accelerated graphics
Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac, including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and iSight cameras

Get the best of both worlds.

Moving to the Mac is easy.
Getting started is a breeze. Import your existing Windows PC with VMware Converter, or easily install a new Windows OS in a few simple steps with Windows Easy Install.

Graduate from Boot Camp.
VMware Fusion is the perfect complement to Apple's Boot Camp. No more choosing between Mac or Windows on boot; run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X from your existing partition. And when you're ready, import your Boot Camp partition to reclaim extra space and enjoy great features such as Snapshots, AutoProtect, and Suspend and Resume.

3D for you and me.
Run 3D games, design software and other graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D hardware-accelerated graphics.

Displays for days.
Use Windows applications across as many displays as you please--up to eight screens.

Mac to the core.
Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion works the way you expect with customizable tool bars, Quick Look integration, searchable Apple help and more.

Airbags for your Mac.
Take snapshots of your Windows installation, and always have the option to roll back to a safe state in case of trouble. And with AutoProtect, automated snapshots let you easily go back in time to before problems occurred.

USB without limits.
VMware Fusion lets you use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac--from GPS receivers, to cell phones, PDAs and even Apple iSight cameras.

Keep the bugs away.
To keep Windows XP and Windows Vista on your Mac as safe as possible, VMware Fusion includes a complimentary 12-month subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus.

Maximize your Mac.
Take your Mac to the max by running virtual machines with up to four virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM and with 64-bit operating systems.

Features:

Seamlessly integrate Windows applications with the Mac
Instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock and more
Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting
Minimize Windows applications to the Dock
Use Exposé to switch between Windows and Mac applications
Import an existing PC with VMware Converter
Install new Windows OS with Windows Easy Install
Run Windows applications across multiple screens
Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac, including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and iSight cameras
Run 3D games, design software and other graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D hardware-accelerated graphics
Winner of more than a dozen industry awards

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Ripoff. Save your money.
I am a previous owner of Parallels 3.0, but I wanted to run some of the new games that Parallels 3.0 didn't support. So I purchased VMware 2.0 about a month ago, not knowing when the new version of Parallels would be available. Ugh! Needless to say, I should definitely have waited. I found VMware 2.0 to be buggy beyond belief and actually slower than the Parallels 3.0 I had installed at my office. Worse yet, it was confusing to use and yielded unexpected results at every turn - things that you would never see running Windows on a PC. A complete waste of money!

Now I've got Parallels 4.0, and I love it. It's faster than most PCs running Windows and screams by comparison to its predecessor. And, most importantly, it works beautifully with the games I've been waiting to use.

Not sure how many other people have tried both VMware and Parallels and had this same experience, but I thought my experience might be useful to people considering VMware.

Rating:

- Windows Under Glass
Overview:

App Performance: A+
VM states suspend and resume seamlessly and quickly.

Windows Performance:A+
The windows users in my office are using fairly new PCs and laptops, but with crappy graphics cards. My Macbook Pro (early 2007 version) runs windows "faster" than any version of windows in the office. Is it really faster? There's no way to know without running benchmarks, but it seems faster, and that's something.

Interface: A -
Accessibility to Windows and Windows apps is simple, as are installation and configuration utilities. Windows apps are still bound to a single screen when using spaces - even in 'unity' mode. This is a major gripe I have with VMs in general, as I use multiple work spaces. For those who use a single screen, or who run the VM in a dedicate screen 'space', this isn't a problem. It keeps me out of 'unity' mode and in full screen though.

Mac/PC sharing: A
Your home folder on your Mac shows up as an attached drive (Z:), making navigation to mac directories and files simple and easy (and fast!)

Networking: A+
Fast networking, with setup so easy I almost forgot to review it :-)
Overall: A+

Details:

I'm a long-time Windows-on-Mac user, starting back in the day of Virtual PC, and most recently using Parallels (I currently use Parallels v3.0). I want to start this review by saying that, for many casual PC users looking to run Windows on a Mac, there probably isn't a need -- most everything I do day to day (at work and home) can be done on either OS, and if you own mac hardware, you'll be happier running Mac apps as well. UNLESS you have that "one application" that isn't supported natively.

In my office, we:
1. use Microsoft exchange for email and scheduling, and so I needed to run Windows
2. use one of those large printer/copier/scanner/collating/faxing monstrosities, and it lacks a working mac driver

Of course, there's a slew of word and powerpoint files to deal with as well, but these can be handled with Office for Mac or OpenOffice. Of course, once running Windows anyway for the two reasons above, I prefer to use native Office apps, because that way I'm 100% the files will be compatible (and plus, I end up having to open them on the Windows side to print them anyway).

My initial impressions of VMware Fusion 2 were very positive. It was easy to install, and the interface is very clean. While it's not 100% fair to compare VMware Fusion 2 to the older version of Parallels 3.0 in terms of performance, it is fair to compare things like interface and usability -- and in these areas, VMware wins, in my opinion. I'll give the blanket caveat up front: Parallels may have fixed some of these things in newer versions ... I'll try to get a copy of Parallels v4.0 and do a follow-up review.

VMware's 'unity' puts windows apps side by side with Mac apps (much like Parallel's 'Coherence'). When in 'unity' mode, you have the option to show the windows task bar, which plunks the ugly windows bar behind the Mac's dock. My dock fills the center 70% of my screen, so the Start Menu and the goofy windows tool tray are nice and visible on the far-left and far-right of the screen. However, because I use virtual screens (Mac's "spaces" feature), and because VMware is bound to one of those screens, I run in full-screen mode -- if I have to switch spaces to get to my PC apps anyway, I don't want the ugly conflict between taskbar & dock.

Networking was so clean I almost forgot to include it in this review: it just worked, piggy-backing my Mac's network connections without requiring any action on my part. Digging in, it offers direct network connections as well as private networking (the PC is only available to the Mac). Nice options, but what's even nicer is I didn't even notice they were there.

Performance is amazing for a VM ... even before enabling access to both processors and boosting the default 512MB of memory to 1GB. The only slow-down on the Mac side occurs during a windows boot (or re-boot as is more often the case) ... otherwise, Windows can sit, used or ignored, running on the mac without any noticeable performance degradation to Mac apps.

Rating:

- Very solid PC emulator for the Mac
When Mac introduced Intel chips they opened the door to finally be able to run PC software on the Mac. I rushed out and bought Parallels. When Parallels was the only game in town it was great. Sure Parallels crashed sometimes, and would often lose its internet connection. But it was great to be able to run PC's.

Now you have an established visualization leader, VMWare in the game. I've rarely seen VMWare crash or drop its internet connection. You're still not going to run 3d windows games at full power/extreme performance. But for everything short of video games, this product does quite well.

VMWare lets me use hardware that just does not support my Mac. I can plug in my TomTom, programmable remote control, Lego Mindstorms and other USB devices that do not have Mac programs. Or in the case of Mindstorms, do not have a very good Mac program!

If you want the best of both worlds, this is a great product!

Rating:

- Just what I needed!
I was sick and tired of rebooting my macbook every time to switch between mac os and windows. Fusion will save you time and frustration. I needed to run a windows program called swish that does not run on mac os. Fusion took care of the problem. Installation of fusion was pretty simple. I already had a partition from bootcamp so I am not sure how installation is if you haven't installed windows with bootcamp and starting fresh. Once installation was complete I was up and running. The application that I was using, "swish" was running very well. It was not lagging or running slow. You can use it full screen and have your macbook look like a windows machine. Or you can run windows and be able to use expose and switch between windows faster. Overall, I really love fusion. I am running windows xp instead of vista. Vista doesn't sound to good so I am sticking with xp. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to run applications that run on windows. If you have word, excel, etc and have the windows version, I would just purchase the mac os version instead.

Rating:

- VMWare gets better and better....
The best part of VMWare Fusion 2 is just how easy it is to use. Though a ton hasn't changed in terms of interface since version 1, the visuals have, and it's a lot more "21st Century" so to speak, with options laid out neatly etc.

Of course, and as you may have gathered from the product description and other reviews here, Fusion 2 is a way of booting your Windows XP/Vista (and other operating systems such as Linux etc) from within the Mac OS. For the sake of this review, I'm using the following:

MacBook Pro 2.53Ghz (late 2008 model)
4GB DDR3
320GB 7200rpm hard disk

Most people are using Fusion to install Windows, so I'll focus on that..

To install Fusion correctly, it's as simple as running the Fusion installer on the CD, and then following the instructions to install your Windows operating system. After a few simple configuration options (like how much RAM you want to allow the virtual OS to take up), you boot into Windows the first time using the installed application. That's all there is to it! The whole process is simple, and once you get into Windows for the first time, VMWare will install a few virtual software drivers automatically.

While running a virtual operating system isn't going to be as fast as running Windows via Boot Camp (i.e. rebooting into Windows without OS X running at all), I found Fusion 2 to be quite speedy. The slowest part of the whole procedure is unquestionably actually booting into Windows. Once this is done, assuming you have 2GB (or preferably 4GB) of system memory, you'll be good to go!

For the gamers in us, you'll be pleased to know that Fusion 2 is a tremendous improvement over Fusion 1. I didn't test gaming extensively, but I did test a few. Sam and Max Volume 1, and Titan Quest. Sam and Max Volume 1 ran absolutely wonderfully on my new MacBook Pro in the virtual OS, and even Titan Quest, a VERY tough game on ANY modern system, ran quite acceptably. I was not expecting this at all.

So, overall, Fusion 2 is a resounding success. In fact, as of 11/14/08, a new update 2.0.1. has been released, which addresses a few issues, and only serves to show that the VMWare team are dedicated to fixing all known issues. It was like this in version 1, and it seems like they are on the ball in version 2.

Two thumbs up for this release: 5/5.


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