Like some of you, I use a Mac and a PC off and on throughout the day. That’s easy when I’m in the office and have a few different computers around me (I am a geek, after all) but when I’m traveling or when I’m working from home I don’t want to have to carry more than one laptop around with me.
What options are there?
My favorite is to use a Intel-based Mac laptop and either dual-boot it using Leopard’s boot camp feature so I can restart the computer into a copy of Microsoft Windows, or to use something called virtualization which I generally prefer.
What is virtualization?
If you look at Wikipedia, “virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources.”
In simpler terms, you could think of virtualization as being a way to run more than one operating system one the same computer, at the same time, and each one believes that it’s the only one running.
Virtualization isn’t new and has actually been around for many years in one form or another, and on a Mac there are two primary choices if you’re looking to run Windows and Windows applications on your Mac:
Parallels has been around for Intel-based Macs (at least in release form) for longer than Fusion has, but VMWare has been in the virtualization game for much longer than Parallels has.
Which is a better performer?
It’s a bit of a mixed bag and depends on what you plan on doing with each.
TUAW pointed out a story over at MacTech where they’ve put each through their paces and compiled some nice performance data.
Check it out for yourself here.
[Via TUAW]
Filed under: tech
