Well bugger me!

[oracleslave]

Did I just drift into a parallel universe?

AAARRGGHHH

[bogeyman]

Did I just drift into a parallel universe?

If you start telling us to get Dells with Vista on them, then yes, definitely.

[bogeyman]

On the virtualisation front, I use VMWare Fusion. It does bog down a little on my iMac 24 with 4Gb but only while the hosted OS boots, or needs massive amounts of page/swap activity.

Last time I compared (which is 2 years or so ago, admittedly) the support from VMWare was supposed to be head and shoulders above Parallels.

I can't be arsed reevaluating Parallels now as Fusion does everything I need and does it very well. I love the 'unity' mode where you can run a specific Windows app in an OS X window, and being able to drag and drop files between OS X and Win (I'm sure Parallels has equivalent features).

The only things that irritate me about Fusion are a) lack of support for host mouse buttons > 2, and b) access to Mac drives/shares can be sluggish unless you map them to drive letters in Win.

Other than that, visualization is a wonderful thing (unless you're a gamer, then Bootcamp is your friend).

[scooterscot]

I run xp on Parallels the image is kept on an external drive conected via the firewire 800 port - fastest I've ever seen xp run loads up in 15-20 seconds.

I've tried the others Parallels for me was the easy winner.

[Diver]

If you start telling us to get Dells with Vista on them, then yes, definitely.

[Platypus]

fastest I've ever seen xp run

A friend of mine switched to Mac and said the same thing.

[scooterscot]

If you start telling us to get Dells with Vista on them, then yes, definitely.

Well I tell you it's the way forward. This vista business is ahead of it's time.

[Spacecadet]

A friend of mine switched to Mac and said the same thing.

Obviously they've not used my Dell before

Seriously though, a decent powered laptop of any brand is going to run XP quicker than some crappy 1ghz, 512mb freebie they got with an AOL connection.

Not only does my laptop run XP quickly, but Visual Studio 2005 runs at a decent pace as well which is much more of a test than XP

Problem with Dell is that most people experience them through corporate bulk purchases where the laptops (and desktops) are sourced on a price per unit basis rather than trying to meet a minimum spec. As long as they run outlook and word/excel at the same time no one complains... apart from the IT bods who end up with an under powered heap of crap.

When you spec the equipment to the job rather than the price then they are no better or worse than other makes.

Apple on the otherhand concentrate on the top end of the market and with graphics/video/audio packages needing some serious hardware to run effectively the average experience is going to be better.

[expat]

Obviously they've not used my Dell before

Seriously though, a decent powered laptop of any brand is going to run XP quicker than some crappy 1ghz, 512mb freebie they got with an AOL connection.

Not only does my laptop run XP quickly, but Visual Studio 2005 runs at a decent pace as well which is much more of a test than XP

Problem with Dell is that most people experience them through corporate bulk purchases where the laptops (and desktops) are sourced on a price per unit basis rather than trying to meet a minimum spec. As long as they run outlook and word/excel at the same time no one complains... apart from the IT bods who end up with an under powered heap of crap.

When you spec the equipment to the job rather than the price then they are no better or worse than other makes.

Apple on the otherhand concentrate on the top end of the market and with graphics/video/audio packages needing some serious hardware to run effectively the average experience is going to be better.

It is true: there are lots of cheapo laptop PCs out there, that Apple just doesn't have an equivalent for.

Result:
Pro-Apple: compare Apple with a decent PC, and the PC price advantage disappears.
Pro-PC: compare Apple with a decent PC, and the Apple "just works", and fast, advantage disappears

[bogeyman]

I run xp on Parallels the image is kept on an external drive conected via the firewire 800 port - fastest I've ever seen xp run loads up in 15-20 seconds.

I've tried the others Parallels for me was the easy winner.

Out of interest, what didn't you like about Fusion compared to Parallels?

You can also boot directly from a USB drive (i.e booting not FireWire only now).