Let me say that the experience was eye opening. Now I can’t say for sure if it was just VirtualBox or a combination of VirtualBox and Windows 7 Pro, but the performance is incredible in this set up. Boot up in Parallels 3 for Vista Business would take at least 1:30-2:30 mins, now it just takes seconds to be at a usable desktop. Applications run and start quicker. Overall it is just a better experience. I didn’t want all the Aero special effects anyway so that was never a feature I needed from my virtualization solution. I don’t mind paying for good applications so cost was not the end all with this decision. But the fact that I can have better performance and not have to pay for a license is a no brainer for me.

I have not used VMware Fusion so I can’t make any comparisons, but for now I will continue to use VirtualBox + Windows 7 for my .NET development. It makes my previous set up feel like a chore to get things done.

http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/Installing
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

In an odd sort of way, Crystal is kind of spooky because it is so transparent in its operation!

It boots up and apparently operates XP faster than various Dells and HP desktops that I use in the school system where I work!

Our school system made the decision 4 years ago to go all Windows, but has backed off on that for practical and yes, cost reasons.

Leopard upgrades are cheap and easy to do on the existing machines, but Vista/Windows 7 has backed them into a very expensive corner. All Windows machines will have to be completely replaced in order to upgrade from XP, so there is a 80,000 lb gorilla in the room. Right now they are pretending it’s not there. The way to deal with it right now is that when a Windows machine quits, they just don’t replace it. Obviously, that can’t go on much longer.

Emacs just crank along with Leopard upgrades.

Any tips on improving these scores would be helpful

As for Outlook, ditch it and use webmail with Entourage, it’s a much better client than Outlook, search for example works great. monodevelop isn’t there yet for VS replacement if you are using things like MVC.

Mac n00b- Jeff

1. Any game that works on Vista will work on 7. I know that MW2 was being sold on Steam, so I ‘m 99% sure it works on 7.

2. It is possible to use VMWare Fusion to game, however you will probably want to use Boot Camp for that. Since VMWare is just a program that runs another OS as a virtual OS, it won’t be able to use as much RAM as it would if you were using Boot Camp.

You can easily keep track of your games if you buy from a digital content provider such as Steam (http://www.steampowered.com). I’m pretty sure all of those games work on 7. Steam on 7 works fine for me.

Hope this helps!

It just seems to run faster than VMWare, and the new Maclook feature and crystal means you can run the applications as if they are actually on your mac desktop (not inside another program).

I normally have it in Space 2, and set to freeze when its not on that space.

Then I can easily switch over to what ever i need it for (generally Fruity Loops), and it doesnt eat up RAM that way.

I need Windows to work with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Outlook. At this point, this is the only things i do in Windows. So i really can’t decided what software to use… Any ideas?

Another thing i noticed is that my mouse, sometimes, goes wild when i run vmware, or in another words, the mouse starts to move faster, very faster! Is this happened to anyone?

Regards,
Bruno

I also use it to do things like monkey around with Moblin, Ubuntu, etc… It works really well. It’s maybe a little less “automatic” than Parallels or VMWare, but it works every bit as well.

I think the consensus on gaming on the mac goes to BootCamp, for the simple reason that anything other than booting up directly into windows (for example, running VMware while you’re in OSX) means your system hardware has to share memory and CPU with OSX in addition to whatever Windows system you’re running, which isn’t ideal for gaming. I have VMWare and Bootcamp running, with BootCamp’s partition set to be very small, since I only really need it for gaming.