Anyone running windows on vmware on their MBP? If so, how is it?

It runs about as well as a virtual machine can run.

As a new mac user, something I found very interesting (and awesome) is that with VMware Fusion. You can install Windows via boot camp, and run it in a dual boot scenario.

And with that very same dual boot image, you can run that image in a virtual state from OSX. So you get the best of both worlds.

 

Well, no. Virtual machines are great for accessing data, email, what have you. But if you were to play a game in a VM vs booting into it natively, no, it is not as fast/powerful.

 

A virtual machine will never be as powerful as a computer running any OS natively.

 

Yes to the boot camp, no to RAM partitioning.

RAM will allocate based on it's need. Nothing permanent. The hard drive allocation is a different story however. Choose your Windows partition size wisely.

 

Probably. I only did 30. . . probably a mistake. I figured I got a Mac to use it's OS, so I gave it as little as I thought I could get away with.

 

I figure that i've got a 320gb hard drive, and the previous gen MBPs had a 200gb. I set 120 for windows and 200 for osx. Sorry, actually 176.88gb for osx and 120gb for windows. I've got a bunch of games installed that take up a good bit of room and you can't resize it unless you format it. I'm going to put a bigger hard drive in later down the road though (maybe in a few years or when it starts getting full) and also hopefully then SSD drives will be bigger than my current drive and extremely fast.

Oops, I just went on a rant haha...my point was to set a little more if you plan on gaming and installing other programs on the windows side.

I've got far cry 2 and only recommend playing games through bootcamp on windows so it will run better. It used to be everyone used windows, but I guess that depends on your school/classes at this point. Maybe you can ask your school or find out on the website what programs you'll be using and then you can find out on the programs site if it's mac compatible. Probably anything except gaming will be fine on a virtual machine (especially if you have 4gb ram which I would recommend if you plan on running one)

 

For games, boot camp is the way to go, but for general stuff, Fusion is just fine. You can also have the best of both worlds (like I do). Fusion can actually boot from your boot camp partition, so if you are playing games, boot into windows, if not, use fusion. That is exactly what I do. Heck, fusion even runs my CAD programs fine (2Gb of ram for fusion).

 

I run my XP install this exact way, it really is the best way in my opinion. I have 4GB or RAM and gave Fusion 2GB when it's running. It runs just as fast as my C2D Lenovo desktop at work.

 

Yes on the audio/video production. Most are actually for both, but mac is better way to go. Like if ur talking CS3 for photo, reason and protools for music, they work great on mac. I run reason myself and find that if you are running it on a PC it seems like they have latency issues sometimes, like if your trying to run something for a performance. But yah, mac is the choice for most big time audio or visual professions. Like as for music, just watch a few concert videos and youll notice they almost always have a MBP sitting there if they are doing sequencing.

 

ive been a pc user for my whole life...recently my computer died and i bought a macbook pro...its great...its way more expensive than a comparable pc (double the price almost) but the mac os is definitely better than windows.

im an engineering student so i run a lot of cad programs and other heavy cpu programs...my mac does it just as good as a pc. the only thing that i really like on a pc more is office 2007...in my opinion it is much more user friendly than the mac version of office.

hope this helps.

 

If you're wondering if it's a good idea...I would have to say yes to about any situation you can think of. This is my first mac and I love this thing. Windows notebooks look cheap in comparison (the ones I've seen) and this is probably one (if not THE) thinnest 15" with these specs. Another reason I chose the MBP was because it wasn't really choosing osx. With an HP, Dell or any other brand you get windows and that's it, but you get both with this. I thought I would use windows more to be honest but I find myself in OSX unless I'm gaming. There are alternatives (usually free) to lots of program for windows on osx. This is a really good OS and I'm pretty happy with it.

I can't really help you with the ipod touch deal (I think they have some sort of ipod deal every year around the same time). It really is worth it to get the pro IMO and you get iLife which is pretty nice. Do some research on the exact programs you'll be using. If you have to run something in bootcamp, it's not a big deal to restart and be in windows in a minute, or use fusion unless you're gaming. Also check youtube for videos running various things (you can even check the last generation MBP videos and you know if it runs on those then it'll definitely run on this one).

 

This isn't true for the Enterprise Space. VMWare's ESX , Citrix's XenServer and perhaps even MetaFrame(although that's merely app virtualization) give the Guest OS direct access to system resources, wheras Desktop virtualization products must go through OS X/Windows to interact with the hardware.

 

I've been testing out virtual machines in the past week or so (just bought my first Mac, too) and Fusion works great for me. I had tried the free VirtualBox and it was giving me some major headaches, namely that I was having a lot of problems setting it up to use my Bootcamp partition as a virtual disk and it had trouble recognizing all but the first cd I inserted and I'd have to completely reboot the virtual machine to get it to work ).

So I downloaded the trial version of Fusion, and haven't looked back. I love Fusion's Unity feature which allows you to use your guest OS's programs just like they're running on Mac OS, and you can even put shortcuts to them on your Dock. I had no problems setting it up to use the Bootcamp partition as it immediately recognized it the first time I used it.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if you create a partition larger than 32GB for Bootcamp, Mac OS X won't be able to access (read or write) the files on that partition. It needs to be formatted as FAT32 for this to happen, and the largest possible FAT32 partition is 32GB. Mac OS even gives you a shortcut to use this size when running the Bootcamp Assistant. Granted, using the Bootcamp partition in Fusion gives you access to shared folders, so you can just save your files on the Mac partition, but you won't be able to do this if booting straight to Bootcamp.

 

Using Fusion on my MBP and it's been great so far, though I haven't done gaming on it yet really. I went with an 80 GB NTFS partition for Vista Ultimate - really wish I would have halved the HDD for OS X and Vista or at least 100 GB for Vista, though. Really wil depend on what you are going to do. If you plan on installing a lot of games for Vista you'll likely need a good amount of space. I have no games installed but a number of applications and I've almost eaten up all my space.

I use Fusion mainly for running some Windows apps and move them to OS X to work with them on other apps. Also use a Windows version of Office 2007 a lot via Fusion, no issues so far.

Adding 2 GB to make it 4GB Ram total makes a decent difference as well performance-wise.

I have it set-up as follows:

150 GB for OS X
80 GB for Windows Vista Ultimate

I have two administrator accounts set-up in Vista, one for Fusion and one for native boot into Windows and am using the BootCamp partition for Fusion.

I'm really happy with the set-up as it adds a lot of flexibilty especially since there are some applications I use that are only offered in Windows and then I modify the results of those apps with an app that works a lot better in OS X. The flexibility is super nice esp. since I spend about half my time or more in Windows and the other halfish in OS X.