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Local World IT - VMware Fusion 2
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List Price: $79.99
Our Price: $61.99
Your Save: $ 18.00 ( 23% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Smith Micro Software Inc.
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Smith Micro Software Inc.
EAN: 0717103883675
Feature: Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting
Format: CD-ROM
Label: Smith Micro Software Inc.
Manufacturer: Smith Micro Software Inc.
Model: VMFM20BX2
Platform: Mac OS X Intel
Publisher: Smith Micro Software Inc.
Release Date: 2008-10-05
Studio: Smith Micro Software Inc.
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Features
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Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting
Run Windows applications across multiple screens; instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock and more
Use Exposé to switch between Windows and Mac applications; minimize Windows applications to the Dock
Run 3D games, design software and other graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D hardware-accelerated graphics
Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac, including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and iSight cameras
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Editorial Reviews:
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Who says you can't have it all? Get the best of both worlds and seamlessly run your favorite Windows applications on the Mac with VMware Fusion. Instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock, and more. Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting, and quickly switch between Windows and Mac applications with Exposé. Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and web cameras. Run 3D games, design software and graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D. You can even bring your entire PC along, virtually, using VMware Converter. Windows really is better on the Mac. Hardware accelerated DirectX 8.1 3D graphics Run Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetWare without rebooting Most integration with the Mac including - Drag and Drop, Copy and Paste, Shared Folders (Windows 2000 and later), Auto-resize and full screen support System Requirements - Intel Mac required Minimum 1 GB of RAM (2 GB RAM recommended) 400 MB free disk space for VMware Fusion, and at least 5 GB for each virtual machine Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later Operating System installation media (disk or disk image) for virtual machines Microsoft Windows (not included)
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: It's OK on average
Comment: I was a little upset about the product itself. I have a new MacBook with 2GB RAM and the system runs pretty slowly when Windows runs.
I was particularly disappointed by the fact that I could not play Civ 4 on the virtual machine.
I decided not to return the product because for the price I paid for it I can use it occasionally (rarely) mostly to open MS Office documents with which I have issues with OppenOffice.
If you do not have already paid for a copy of MS Windows and MS Office, I really don't think it's very useful. I am also not quite 100% clear about the security issues that the use of the virtual machine implies, it is kind of unclear how much exposure does the data and the machine get to malware while running Fusion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very, very useful!
Comment: First up, I can not compare this to Parallels 4. I shifted to Fusion before Parallels 3 came out and never went back. I did run Parallels 1.x, Fusion 1.x, and Boot Camp originally. It worked fairly well but I can warn you that having Fusion and Parallels both offer up your Boot Camp partition (one at a time of course) causea the Windows activation system to get rather irritated. It caused Windows to force a reactivation every time I launched it. No problem with Boot Camp + Fusion or Boot Camp + Parallels, the problem only pops up when trying to do Boot Camp + Fusion + Parallels. Not something that is typically done but something to be aware of if you are planning to evaluate different virtualization options using your Boot Camp partition as the source.
With that out of the way, I am very pleased with Fusion 2. Fusion 1 was ok but seemed a but rough and not Mac-like from a user interface perspective. The Fusion 2 user interface has been polished and feels more Mac-like. It's a minor detail but I appreciate it.
Performance-wise, I have no complaints at all. Fusion has never crashed on me. XP actually feels much, much snappier when running inside a virtual machine than when running native. I only use it for launching XP machines right now so I can't comment how it handles other OS's (Vista 32/64, XP-64, Linux, etc).
I use Fusion on a few different machines. Mac Pro (2.66 GHz dual cpu, dual core/4 GB memory), MacBook Pro 15" (2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo / 2 GB memory) , and a MacBook Pro 17" (2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo / 4 GB memory). No problems on any of them. Of course the Mac Pro is the fastest; it has the fastest hard drives, fastest memory, and most available cpu resources. XP inside Fusion on the Mac Pro is very, very fast. Definitely much more responsive than booting to Windows natively. That said, running XP inside Fusion on the MBPs are still snappy. I've never found myself twiddling my thumbs or muttering to myself wondering when it will finish doing whatever it is I asked.
Fusion can use VMWare Workstation images. That is a huge benefit for those of us in the IT industry. It opens up the ability to use various VMWare appliance images that people build by simply downloading the image and opening it. There is also a trend for vendors to provide a preconfigured VMWare image to clients for demo and testing purposes. With Fusion you have access to all of those virtual machine images without any fuss.
If you find yourself having a problem switching between the Mac cmd hotkeys and Windows ctrl / alt hotkeys you can configure Fusion to map the Mac key commands to Windows key commands.
Unity is a rather nifty feature. Unfortunately I can't use it often because a key application I use, SecureCRT, behaves a bit differently in Unity mode than in non-Unity. SecureCRT runs as a single process / application but has a few different windows open. In Unity mode, cmd-tab behaves in the Mac way, cycling you through active applications. It won't cycle you between the different windows inside the application. In the Mac-world, you use cmd-` to switch between windows inside an application. That sort of works while in Unity mode. It will cycle the different windows to the foreground but it doesn't set focus / activate the window. You have to use alt-tab to cycle between the windows and have the window activate when it comes to the foreground. So, cmd-tab to get to the application, then alt-tab to cycle and activate the windows of the application. SecureCRT isn't the only application that is a single process with multiple windows. I'm pretty sure that Firefox and Opera also operate in that mode. Office apps may as well.
Fusion also allows you to set the default application to handle things like URLs. Windows can get sent to Mac or Mac can get sent over to Windows. Or if you want you can do a mix. For example, you could use Mail on the Mac side for handling all mailto links and Internet Explore to handle all http or https links. Not that I would recommend it but you could. Supported types you can map back and forth are: mailto, http/https, telnet/ssh, news, ftp/sftp, news, and feed. Each type can be enabled or disabled individually.
One minor annoyance: If you disabled autorun inside Windows then VMWare Tools will not install automatically. You can choose the option to install the tools from the menu but it only mounts the cd image for the tools. You'll have to go into My Computer, open the tools cd drive, and launch the setup manually. I wondered why the tools didn't autoinstall on one system but did on another; that was why.
So, the gist of all that? If you're looking for virtualization for Mac then Fusion is a very good choice. If you already use VMWare Workstation on Windows or Linux then it's pretty much a no-brainer to go with Fusion on the Mac.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works great
Comment: Program works great. The instructions are easy to follow. Very easy to switch between OS X and Windows. I installed Windows Xp and it runs very well on my mac. The only issue I have it that if I insert a CD/DVD into Windows it won't always appear on my mac's desktop until i disable the cd-rom drive in vmware.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Almost like having a PC lurking inside the Mac
Comment: I haven't spent too much time within the "virtual machine" I imported from my old PC (using Windows XP), but so far all of the functional facets of the programs seem to work just as they should, with the exception of some funny behavior when accessing external peripherals attached to the Mac. For instance, I tried to use the SSC Service Utility (Windows only) to re-set the counter on my Epson printer, and it just reports that there is a problem accessing the printer. I haven't tried troubleshooting this much, since I don't need to use this on an ongoing basis, but it just illustrates that not everything works exactly as it would if you were running an actual Winbox. But for the price, it's an outstanding way to move to a Mac and still keep your old Windows machine alive inside the Mac for those occasions when you just need to use the PC.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Added flexibilty to my iMac
Comment: Great product! Really allows me to run Windows XP and MAC OS X side by side.
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