I have since I received my MacBook Pro always run Windows using VM Ware Fusion, and this has been working pretty good. I could have multiple instances of Visual Studio open and do my job. I always updated to the latest version that was available so now that version 3 was released I downloaded it and installed it. And all was fine, until I saw this screen cast by Skeeter showing significant speed benefits from using Parallels 5 versus Fusion 3.

So I had to try it out, so I also wanted to see what the Windows Experience would tell me and here is the previous run on Fusion 2.

Unfortunately when running Fusion 3 I was unable to do the diagnostic as it kept crashing when trying to test the Graphics capabilities, so I was even more surprised about the results that I got from Parallels 5.

Now as you can see the Processor rating has actually gone down, but I am actually not to worried about that. Meaning I am sure that has more to do with external variables. Anyway look at the Graphics performance.

Now graphics performance is nice, but as a coder that is not really what I think is important is how responsive my Visual Studio IDE is and I have to say it does feel quit a bit faster then in Fusion 3 and I also really like how it integrates with my Mac. I am also happy to say that the conversion from my Fusion image to the Parallels image went without any problems, it did take about an hour do. So for me this is my new virtual platform, at least for now.

Mark Nijhof