VMware Fusion 4 [Old Version]

VMware Fusion 4 easily beats out Parallels. It is far less resource intensive and does not lag my system (MacBook Air 2.13 4GB machine). It is a bit slow when it comes to Windows 7 but is still much faster than the barely usable Parallels. Easier cloning of VM instances would be nice but I cant complain. This makes browser and OS testing very easy. Windows XP, Windows 7, and Ubuntu all installed quickly and without any problems. Highly recommended.

As a long time user of VMWare products, I was pleasantly impressed yet again.

Includes a USB drive in case you dont have an optical drive. Installation went smoothly, and allows use of Windows with no problems to date.

Im sure this has been reviewed this way and that so Ill focus on a couple of things that were salient for me.

This is a very fast and worthwhile version of VMware Fusion, which has consistently provided great VM capabilities for Macs to run Windows and thus Windows programs.

I have been using this product for over 6 months now. It is functional in the sense that it does allow you to run Windows on a Mac but it sometimes takes several minutes for this program to load on a Nov 2011 MacBook Pro (with plenty of memory and plenty of hard drive space available). I need this program (or one of its competitors) to allow me to run a Windows only program (Minitab) on my Mac. I read good things about the newer version of this program being faster and I am more than willing to pay to upgrade to the newer version. My one and only reservation is I dont want to have to spend all the time and find all the activation codes to reinstall Windows, my anti-virus software, and Minitab on my Mac. I have repeatedly written to and called VMware trying to get one simple question answered - will upgrading to Fusion 5 require me to reinstall all my Windows based software or will it simply keep what is already installed on my Mac without me having to spend the time to reinstall everything?

No real problems except that VMware seem to assume I am a company. Regular updates. It does what I need.

ok

For much of my life, I was a self-described Windows guy. However, in the past few years Ive gotten more into blogging, recording, and video editing. All of these things seemed like theyd be so much better on the Mac. The big challenge for me is that I have some favorite programs that are windows-only.

Im a big Mac user, but my job uses PCs. Thats always been an issue for me working on programs that arent Mac. I wind up working twice as hard to make files compatible between both platforms, and half the time I lose formatting.