Does anyone use Fusion to run Windows on their Mac?

jamie_c

I'm considering purchasing Fusion to run Windows on my Mac in order to get some time with the Windows version of GS. Does anyone have any recommendations for Fusion vs Parallels and since I'm going to purchase Windows as well, is either Vista, 7, or 8 recommended?

I think I want to use Fusion or Parallels emulation (not bootcamp) so I don't have to be switching between Mac and Windows with a re-start all the time, but I'm open to comments on that approach as well.

hangn

Virtual box is free and can run windows.

hangn

And for windows use windows 7 home basic.

jonmulcahy

i have parallels. In the reviews of Paralles 8 it had better performance than fusion. I owned fusion a few years ago, but made the switch 2 years ago.

TheGabfather

I haven't tried alternatives, but I got a serial for Parallels 8 from my university around 4 months ago and I've been running Windows 7 64bit on it, on my Air. Smooth experience so far. No troubles, no slowdowns. I like how it's so easy to share files (eg GS project files) between both OS thanks to the Coherence feature, but then I haven't tried others so I'm not aware if they also have that feature.

jamie_c

Thanks for the input all, I'm going to check out Parallels free trial first and see how it goes.

jonmulcahy

what's nice about parallels (and I'm pretty sure Fusion has this too), is that you can link it right into your bootcamp partition if you have one. So you have the ability to boot into windows, or just load parallels

jamie_c

@jonmulcahy, that sounds interesting, thanks for the tip.