VMware Fusion

VMWare feels snappier to me, but Parallels has some nice, polished features. Installing XP with Parallels was a breeze.

VMWare is the way to go. I've used both, and it runs so much better. Doesn't bog down your Mac when your running it, you can leave it running in the background and go on with life. If also allows you to run only one processor as an option which is nice for keeping it contained.

VMWare is also $30 cheaper right now I think.

Thanks, I think you are right. Both Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion will do the job well enough, and I don't think I should agonize over the decision... ...

Yes, that is correct. And I finally got it to work under VMWare. Everything is working fine, now.

It depends on what you will be doing within Parallels or VMWare I think. ...

Back to virtualization, has anyone out there tried both VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop, in their current forms, and been able to make their own comparison? ...

*cough* ... I still - after all these years of Apple promoting 64bit computing (remember the G5?) - haven't heard whether 64bit computing makes any sense *at all* on a computer with less memory than the bottleneck size of 32bit memory addressing. Maybe my _question_ is stupid, could very well be. But if 64bit mainly is about using stuff that can address RAM in excess of 4 GB,...

If you plan on using end applications that are compiled for 64-bit, then running them on 64-bit OS will be more smooth. ("4) Use a 64-bit virtual machine with a 64-bit OS, if you have one available." Link) Windows performance 32 vs 64 "The better performance with x64 OSes is only with x64 apps like autocad 2008, 32-bit apps run as usual." on AutoCAD. Ubuntu: 32 or 64bits?...

Absolutely, I agree. :) It's good to have a range of people from different backgrounds and with different experiences. I certainly was not criticizing earlier, by the way. We all have our preferred tools for each task, and it is good/useful to hear why people make the choices they do. Argh, that's the problem... I'm not so good at making decisions! :D