VMware Fusion Review

Today I am going to talk a little bit about an application that I have been using for a few months. The application is VMware Fusion. This app emulates a pc environment and allows you to run Windows on a Mac. Now right off the bat you might ask why would you ever want to do that. And I agree, but there are certain situations that require you to use a Windows platform to run certain apps.

Take, for example, Microsoft Frontpage. I do the content management for the website of the place I work. I did not design the site, but it is one of my responsibilities to make sure all the current information is posted on a regular basis. When I first started and they asked me to take this over, I was shocked to find out that they had used Frontpage to design the site and the only way I was even able to login to the site was through Frontpage. It is was very frustrating for me. I would have been happy editing the content in a basic text/html and just uploading the changes via ftp, but no, that was not allowed the way the account had been set up.

After accepting the fact that I was going to have to use a Microsoft app to do my job, I started looking at ways to run Windows on my Mac. I tried Parallels and Virtual PC and did not like them very much. It was actually difficult to even get them to run on my machine. Then I came across VMware Fusion. This is a pretty new application and right away I have been pleased. It is reasonably priced at $79 (there is a $20 mail in rebate until the end of the year) and was a breeze to set up.

All of my peripherals work with the virtual machine. The coolest part of the program is the way it integrates with the user interface of my Mac I am able to run Windows apps right on my desktop. They even show up in the OS X doc. It is pretty cool.

When I am at home and have my MacBook hooked up to my widescreen monitor, I use the laptop display in full screen mode as my Windows environment and the external monitor as my Mac environment. It is like running two machines side by side, but being able to control both of them with one mouse and keyboard.

Here are a few screenshots.