VMWare

Tried Parallels as I said here. I have also just tried VMware Workstation 6 for Vista. I have built ubuntu 7.10 and XP Pro on my C2D PC running Vista. Experience is better than Parallels both at installation and running them.

There are few distinct good things about VMware

1. VMware let you decide how many cores for your guest OS


2. VMware supports more than 1 monitor (upto 10 if you have that many available to your host OS)


3. networking between OS is a lot easier using NAT, network address translation


4. the guest OS runs on a file instead of a partition of my HDD

I'll be trying an evaluation copy of fusion on my MacBook. For $79.99 I think it's a good deal. VMware for Windows costs a lot more at $189. Again I prefer not to run ubuntu from a partition 'cos I have dual monitor so I could be doing a few things at once.

I'll have to find out if VMware requires XP Pro w/SP2 for installation. I don't believe so as VMware forms a layer between OS X and the guest OS therefore not having direct access to MacBook's hardware hence shouldn't be requiring SP2 in order to run BootCamp?!