I just switched to OS X (Leopard) a few weeks ago and I still need to run a few Windows applications that I still couldn’t find anything comparable in MAC OS. Many choices are available for me starting from Bootcamp that I need to reboot every time I want to run Windows applications. Or try either VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop to run a virtual machine so that I don’t need to restart computer every time I need to run Windows Application. A good feature for both VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop is that both of them can run Bootcamp partition as a virtual machine on OS X also. However, since I just need to run just a few applications on Windows. So, Virtual Machine should be enough.

I started by trying Parallels Desktop first. It looks great. The Windows installation is impressive. However, after I’ve used it for a while, I feel like…. it’s stable enough. It shows some lag from time to time. Two things that is pretty annoying for me after I have used it for one full day are:

1. After I suspended my virtual machine, resume back caused all my network sharing folders to stop working. It has all links there but can’t connect to any of them. (It shows “The handle is invalid”) Tried it twice to make sure it’s not some other problem.

2. Prl_vm_app process is occasionally uses almost 100% of my CPU. This is pretty annoying when I need to do something quickly and stuck with it. Well, I only run one application and that application can cause the entire VM to use almost 100%? That’s strange. I feel like it’s either hit or miss. If the VM turns on and works fine. It will work fine. If not, restart it until it does. Not only that I search google and found that many people experienced similar problem since 2008. Seem like all the fix they came out doesn’t really fix the problem though.

So, I switched again. I try VMWare Fusion. What I did is just import VM from Parallels to have exact copy of VM. Turn it on, try to suspend the VM. It came back and works the way it should be. No network problem. Try to run an application that used to have problem with Parallels Desktop. It runs perfectly fine. CPU usage doesn’t show any problem.

I will stick with VMWare Fusion for a while and see if I experience any problem or not.

Note : Software Tested
- VMware Fusion 2.0.5 Build 173382 (Release Jun 23, 2009)
- Parallels Desktop 4.0.3844.408728 (Release May 6, 2009)
- OS X (Leopard 10.5.7)
- MS Windows XP Service Pack 3