So, after having a few meltdowns w/ Parallels, I decided to give VMWare Fusion a go.

The Parallels problems seem to have gone away (fingers crossed) with the latest Mac OS X upgrade.

But, I’m still working with VMWare. A couple of pluses:

• I could be wrong, but qualitatively, I think XP under VMWare is faster. I do a lot of compilations over shared volumes – they seem to go faster under VMWare.
• The images are smaller w/ VMWare. In the case of my XP VM, it went down from 38gb to 33gb. That’s significant.

On the down side:

• Trying to get Yahoo Messenger to work in the XP VM was a nightmare – big hangs and I had to power down the system and reboot several times.
• Bluetooth audio doesn’t appear to be working in VMWare.

Both of those features in the last work quite well in Parallels.

But, the only thing I want this capability for is VOIPing over YM. The good news on that front is that Yahoo has just release a Mac version of Messenger (and that’s a big honkin’ YAHOO!). Thus far, it seems to work pretty well.

Which eliminates the need for the VOIP solution under the XP VM (one of the critical reasons for keeping Windows around…)

Users of Skype can be happy, too – they’ve had Mac version out for some time, now.

rickb