I upgraded my aluminum MacBook’s RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB in order to run these programs and replaced the stock 160 GB hard drive with a 500 GB model. (Nicely, both Fusion and Parallels default to creating expandable virtual drives – Windows may think it’s got a 30 GB hard drive, but if you’ve currently got 16 GB of files installed, the virtual drive will only take up 16 GB of space, not 30). As well, you’ll need enough free hard drive space for virtual hard drives for each operating system you install. Users should note that any of these virtualization programs make high demands on their computer – you’ll need enough RAM to provide an adequate amount of memory for both the guest operating system (Windows or another PC OS) and the host operating system (Mac OS X), since both are running at the same time. While lacking some of the features of the VMware and Parallels products, VirtualBox has been quietly improving with each release and has one big advantage – it’s free. While this article will be focussing on VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop, users interested in virtualizing should also pay attention to VirtualBox. With the new Fusion 3.0 and Parallels Desktop 5.0, each company has made an effort to move in on the other product’s strengths while improving the 3D performance that has limited the appeal of both products to gamers and other users needing strong 3D graphics capabilities. While Parallels Desktop was the first virtualization software for Intel Macs, VMware claims that Fusion now has the most users. While both have offered relatively straightforward ways to run Windows and other PC operating systems on an Intel Mac with pretty good performance in earlier incarnations, Fusion offered higher-end features – 64-bit and multiprocessor support – while Parallels gave the user better integration with the Mac user interface. The October release of Microsoft’s Windows 7 brought a flurry of activity on the Mac2Windows front – new versions of both of the major virtualization programs for the Mac platform: VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop.

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