VMWare Fusion kills Parallels

Posted on September 14th, 2007 by grinthock.
Categories: PC Hardware, Software.

Recently I sold my beloved PowerMAC Dual G5 box, and picked up one of the new iMAC 20″ machines. So far i’ve been fairly happy with it, i’ve been looking to make the jump to Intel MAC for some time, simply because I do run into situations where the occasional Windows app is required, and the idea of Parallels and their Coherance feature is amazing.

Before I jump right into this, I’d like to say — as I had always expected my brand new 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo CPU powered iMac STILL is not as snappy as my old PowerMAC G5, I could do 100 things at once on the G5, and the User Interface would not slow down, not bog down, it felt like I was operating a supercomputer (and the G5 was at one time considered the only available desktop supercomputer) to that end I am disappointed at Apple. I always thought the switch from PPC to Intel was a mistake.  In the coming months when Leopard is released and true 64 Bit Operating System support is enabled, let’s see what happens, as my PowerMAC was native 64 Bit and there is a chance that was the difference.

Now on to this actual article. 2nd day I had the mac I ran out and purchased Parallels, a VM application that will let you run Windows simultaneously with OS X and have seamless windows, where Windows apps and OS X Apps can share the OS X dock, they move around on the same screen, it all feels like one OS.. Sounds perfect right?

In Theory yes, in practice? Not so much. Parallels trashed my BootCamp partition once, that took some screwing with to fix, (luckily I’m still in the testing phase, I haven’t started trusting this stuff yet) and the Coherence feature looks pretty good, works not too bad but the entire thing seems kind of sluggish – Parallels was $79 and yes I did actually purchase it.

VMWare Fusion is much of the same, however in recent weeks i’ve been hearing about the great performance of VMWare Fusion, and why not! This is VMWare, the company i’ve been using products from for a very long time, plus if I use Fusion, all of my existing VM’s will operate.

So far VMWare Fusion is defiantly 200% faster, ok no fancy graphs, or some stopwatch or controlled conditions, but that isn’t what it’s about, it’s about user experience and how we perceive speed, and clearly it feels faster and that’s what matters.

I’m still getting used to VMWare’s seamless windows support that they call “Unity” and learning exactly how it works, I do have 2 quams thou. Parallels allowed me to have the windows taskbar on the screen, I had it on the side, so I had 2 taskbars, Unity doesn’t let me have one at all, I have to launch windows apps from the VMWare Fusion menu bar in OS X. Unity also seems to grab focus alot whenever there is a pop up, and that’s kind of annoying.

All in all, VMWare Fusion seems like a much better product from a company who’s lifeblood is VM’s. So if you have a MAC and want to be running Windows applications side by side — VMWare Fusion is the way to go.

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Data Recovery Success!

Posted on March 13th, 2007 by grinthock.
Categories: PC Hardware, What's Up Department.

Recovery

Well other than some settings loss, and a requirement to re-install a few software bits, it looks like i’ve recovered all of the lost data. I’m slowly moving over as much of the software that I can to avoid re-installing that (wonders of a MAC, you just move software around as a single container, no need to really install it)

System was probably due for a re-install anyway, but the old drive is probably pooched, either way it’s going to hell because I simply cannot trust it anymore. In a few days I should have things back to normal, probably just in time for the leopard release, at which point i’ll want to re-install again :D

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Hard Drive Failure – No Closer to joy

Posted on March 13th, 2007 by grinthock.
Categories: PC Hardware, What's Up Department.

No closer to joy that’s for sure.  DiskWarrior ran all night and didn’t get ahead, it reported “Hard DRive Read Error” like crazy.

My biggest concern is my entire iTunes Library is on that drive, and re-finding all that stuff will be a pain.

Phase 2 tonight will involve purchasing a new drive, installing it, and attempting to copy the GOOD data off the drive.

Phase 3 will involve my new SAN and some redundant HDD’s on my system.

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