Comments on: Windows on a Mac

By: Brett Legree

Brett Legree — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:54:03 +0000

I second that – AVG has worked well for me for many years.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:13:12 +0000

@Stuart – Try AVG. I’ve had pretty good luck with it.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:08:53 +0000

I’m trying out Fusion now. I love it so far. I just hate trying to find free antivirus stuff for Windows now.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:10:32 +0000

@Brett – Thanks for the information. I’ll have to try out the new version of Fusion. I have CrossOver Mac, but I haven’t tried it for anything other than a game or two.

Is the 2.0 release pretty stable in your experience?

By: Brett Legree

Brett Legree — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:33:02 +0000

@Mark,

My pleasure! I used to use CrossOver on Linux to run Office which worked well. The new Fusion supports DirectX 9 and runs quite a few games at an acceptable level (at least the ones I want to play!), so I’ve not done much with CrossOver Mac myself.

So far Fusion 2.0 has been good. I did encounter one odd thing with one of the new features – it allows a kind of “folder sharing” that can map some of your Mac’s folders (Documents, Music, Pictures) to the guest machine’s equivalents – but Beta 2 seemed to do something to the host folders, and I had to manually change them back to allow write access.

(I think Repair Permissions under the Disk Utility would have done the same thing.)

I might try it anyway with the RC and see if they fixed that, since I know I can change it back myself.

Generally it has been stable and good enough for me to run Office 2007 without issues. The Unity mode is also really nice.

Give it a shot if you like, as it is free to use for now. They also include a 1-year McAfee antivirus licence with it.

-Brett

By: Brett Legree

Brett Legree — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:04:50 +0000

I use Fusion myself (and the first release candidate of Fusion 2.0 just came out today), but you could also use VirtualBox at http://www.virtualbox.org/ or CrossOver Mac at http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/ – VirtualBox works similarly to Fusion and Parallels, whereas CrossOver Mac is based on WINE and you don’t need a Windows licence to run your programs.

I agree with you, XP is more responsive than Vista.

-Brett