VMware Fusion for $40

Both offer similar performance, but Parallels is a little less hungry on resources I think. Here is a great shootout of the 2 products, vs Boot camp and a regular PC running XP and Vista: http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.24/24.02/VirtualizationBench... The interesting point right here: Clearly, most people are still using XP, and not Vista. And clearly, Vista doesn't perform anywhere near as fast as XP on the same hardware. But, Vista is ultimately the future for Windows, and over time will gain greater acceptance, and therefore is something that we want to keep an eye on. Using our Boot Camp configuration as a means for comparison, we found Vista ran 17-30% slower than the equivalent XP setup. By comparison, when we compared XP configurations against the baseline PC, we got these results: * XP under Boot Camp averaged 12% faster than the baseline PC running XP * XP under VMware Fusion averaged 1% faster than the baseline PC running XP * XP under Parallels averaged 19% faster than the baseline PC running XP There are three ways to look at how Vista performed in comparison to XP. The first way is to compare VMware Fusion and Parallels to Boot Camp. And the second way, is to compare Vista for each virtual machine compared to the XP performance for that same virtual machine. The third way is to look at the complex task tests which have to do mostly with the user interface of the virtualization environments. When we compare VMware Fusion and Parallels running Vista to the same model of computer running Vista under Boot Camp, here are the averages that we got: * Vista under VMware Fusion averaged 46% slower than Vista under Boot Camp * Vista under VMware Fusion is 44% faster than Vista under Parallels * Vista under Parallels averaged 110% slower than Vista under Boot Camp When we compare each of the environments running Vista to the same environment running XP, here are the averages that we got: * Vista under Boot Camp averaged 24% slower than XP * Vista under VMware Fusion averaged 32% slower than XP * Vista under Parallels averaged 85% slower than XP It's a completely different story when we look at VMware Fusion and Parallels running Vista for the multi-step task tests. Since these tests focus on user interface focusing on the integration of Windows and Mac OS X applications, it's primarily focused on the steps the human has to take, not raw processing. Here, Parallels is consistently 5x faster than VMware Fusion when looking at cross platform task tests in Vista...

I know that Vista is very fast using Bootcamp on a 3GHz quad Pro Tower. I guess it may seem slower on those less powerful iMac and MacBooks. I have no comparison with XP, but do not believe that I could notice and speed difference on a Pro Tower, since Vista is so fast. I do note, as stated by myself previously and on the web, that the Pro Towers top end at 2 GBs of RAM with Vista and XP, but the MacBooks will see 3 GB, or at least many of them will see it as reported on the the web. I have 4GB but Vista can only see 2GB. Google [and Apple] was unable to find a solution.

"Combine Fusion with an OEM version of Windows XP Home ($90) or Pro ($140) or various OEM versions of Vista ($90 to $169), and you've got a fairly inexpensive solution for running Windows and Mac apps side-by-side." Except that it's not legal to buy an OEM System Builder copy unless you a) a system builder, and b) it's for resale on a new computer system. Are you going to tell Mackie users to download illegal codecs for playing various media files on Windows from Free-Codecs.com again, too?