I’ve got this one app that requires me to be able to run Windows. It’s for work and it’s one of those oddball apps that’s purpose built to interact with a relatively esoteric piece of equipment. Fortunately, around the time that I started this job, Parallels arrived on the scene and saved me from having to buy a cheap PC laptop. Hooray!
All in all, I’ve been satisfied with Parallels, though not really rapturous. It can get kinda wonky and chews through CPU like nobody’s business. So much so that I’ve been loathe to use Parallels for anything other than this one oddball app and haven’t done much exploring of the various Windows apps out there.
Well, today I installed the VMWare Fusion demo and I’m pretty impressed. The install was easy, as was installing Windows—it was actually much simpler than installing in Parallels, though I understand they’ve improved their Windows install helper—no activation issues, no fiddling with anything really. It just worked.
The amazing thing that I’ve found is that, even with apps running, VMWare uses less than half the CPU that Parallels uses idle. As a result, Vera is much cooler and happier. It was pretty normal for me to find myself walking away from Vera to do something else while waiting for Parallels to give up enough resources for me to actually do something else. I haven’t had any SPOD issues with VMWare yet. Everything feels snappy and responsive.
One of my big peeves with Parallels is how it doesn’t like to play with the rest of the apps. For instance, when in Parallels I find that I can’t command-tab to anything else, nor can I use Quicksilver. Command-tab and command-space do nothing until anything other than Parallels has focus. This is seriously annoying. Also I’ve found that the keyboard shortcuts for toggling full screen and the OS window are fairly flaky, so much so that I actually avoid fullscreen. On those occasions where I accidently invoke full screen I normally spend several minutes cursing trying to undo it. Sometimes I even have to quit Parallels entirely.
I’m very happy to report that VMWare works quite well with command tab and Quicksilver, at least as far as not interfering with them goes.
On the negative side, I have noticed a couple of things I don’t like. Unity (VMWare’s version of Parallels Coherence) seems to work and look much better than Coherence until you close your last Windows app. At that point you can’t see or interact with VMWare’s desktop in any obvious way: the commands for switching between Unity, OS Window and Full Screen are grayed out. You either quit and restart the VM or you launch another app with VMWare’s “Launch” command, found in the Application menu. Unfortunately I’ve found that the “Launch” command doesn’t work reliably. Also, it seems that the Application menu doesn’t find out about new apps added to your VM until you’ve quit and restarted the VM. It’d be nice if it was updated a bit more dynamically. Some sort of user configurable launcher would be extremely nice as the current Applications menu just seems sort of messy.
VMWare’s use of Vera’s resources is so light that I thought I’d give µTorrent a try and now I understand what all the fuss is about: all the good features of Azureus without the complexity and bloat. I’ve been using Xtorrent, which I like very much but is unfortunately banned by several trackers for it’s use of the libtransmission library. Even running inside a VM, µTorrent seems more responsive and less cumbersome than Azureus and that’s saying something. It’s also easily the fastest client I’ve ever used in terms of throughput. When the Mac version comes out I am leaving Azureus behind for sure, maybe Xtorrent as well.
Haven’t decided yet if I’m going to ditch Parallels and move to Fusion, but I’m seriously considering it. I’ll let you know in a few days. If you’re curious, they have a 30 day demo to try for yourself.
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