Mac Forum / General / General / May 2009

Well, to start, Roxio has nothing to do with VMware, AFAIK.

I run Vista under Fusion and it meets my limited needs. I haven't
personally noticed any really heinous bugs and it allows me to use
software that I bought a long time ago to do things I occasionally
need to do.

VMware provides regular updates and seems to be responsive. Fusion
is the low-end of their virtualization products...

It works fine for me. As always, YMMV

As noted elsewhere, Roxio? But other than that...

The good is that you can run Windows in it. It works. You can also run
other things, but Windows is the most common.

The bad is that you then have Windows to deal with. :-(

That part about the bad is only half humorous; the other half is
completely serious. There are people (quite a lot of them, apparently),
who think that somehow the fact that they are running on an Apple
machine automatically makes them invulverable to all the problems of
Windows. Ain't so. You are running a real installation of Windows and it
is subject to all the problems of any other Windows installation,
notably malware attacks. That's not a problem with Vmware; it is just
Windows.

The other big caveat is not to expect it to work for Windows games. Yes,
I overgeneralize. There exist games that will work. But as a first
approximation, assume that games won't work. That's because games tend
to push hardware requirements pretty hard, particularly video card
hardware. The virtual machine that Windows runs on under VMWare won't
meet a lot of those hardware requirements.

There exist a few other things that won't do well. Mostly they tend to
be in the category of things that push hardware particularly hard. For
example, if you have an app that is particularly hungry for memory,
realize that Vmware won't be using 100% of your memory for Windows.

I've mentioned only the special cases above. Most Windows apps work just
as well (or poorly) as they do in any other Windows install.

Roxio?

I find VMware's Fusion 2 <http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/> runs
WinXP well enough for me to run serious Windows apps and older Windows
games just fine. I still need to use Crossover or Boot Camp (booting
natively into Windows) to run newer Windows games at a decent speed.

I would not attempt to run virtualisation software such as Fusion or
Virtual Box (free and well worth a go before trying a commercial
alternative like Fusion) without at least 4GB RAM.

HTH,
Jamie Kahn Genet