Parallels vs VM Ware Fusion

At home, I use Parallels on a MacBook Pro 2.6Ghz with 8GB RAM. Guest OS = Win XP, 2 CPUs, 2GB RAM.
At work, I use VMWare Fusion on a Mac Pro 8x2.6Ghz with 12GB RAM. Guest OS = Win 7 64bit, 8 CPUs, 5GB RAM.

In both cases, I have a second monitor and run the guest OS full screen on the second monitor.

For a while I preferred Parallels, but I put that down to familiarity.

However, just recently, I've started playing a game (League of Legends - lots of fun). So I've got quite a good comparison point now. And basically Parallels is the clear winner. Here's a few reasons why:

• Way better audio. VM Ware has a terrible audio latency, which makes working any form of media just plain annoying.
• Way better graphics. Interestingly enough, LoL claims to do 45fps in VMWare Fusion and 30fps in Parallels, but the experience of watching it is clear: Parallels is way smoother. Frame rates vary, and VMWare is really jerky and unresponsive.
• UI responsiveness. Really important for games, the machine needs to respond to keyboard and mouse events quickly. Parallels does, VMWare doesn't.
• Mac-Windows integration is just more clever in my opinion. I get one app switcher (CMD+TAB) for mac and windows apps using Parallels. In VMWare I get a mac-switcher and a windows-switcher. There's more than that, but I'm not going to go through them all.

There's lots of other more technical comparisons between them, but I think what I've mentioned above is very relevant because it's how I as a user experience it.

So, if you want to play games, or use anything media related (even watching YouTube), then go for Parallels and not VM Ware.

How to Import a VMWare image into Parallels

I spent ages reading around on the web for the best and easiest way to import a VM Ware vm into Parallels. Parallels Transporter is an option, but it requires the guest VM to be running, which may not be useful if it's a downloaded appliance image or whatever.

The answer is frightfully simple (although hard to find).

1. Launch Parallels.
2. File -> Open, and select the VM Ware image.
3. Save.

Done, converting. It'll take a while, this image is big. Let's see how it goes...

Hard Disk recovery

Just the other day I had a hard drive "stop mounting" with this type of message:

Disk Utility was no help. So I took it to a friend who has Disk Warrior. Again no luck.

After some research into other products, I saw that Data Rescue II by Pro Soft Engineering had a demo version. Download away.

Seems that it's a great product. At first it found no files - but I was trying to scan the partition. When I scanned the whole drive (not just the partition that wasn't mounting), then it provided a list of files for me to recover to another hard drive!

One interesting part of their philosophy is that recovery is a read-only operation. This is great because it prevents anything from being further corrupted by a repair gone wrong.

So now I'll be buying a copy and another 200+GB drive to recover my data onto.

Thanks Pro Soft Engineering for a great product.

On thing is odd though... why is it called Data Rescue II version 1.2? Wouldn't it just be version 2.2? :)

ADSL but only 1

We finally have an ADSL connection at home.

Our mobile broadband has been pretty good. It has similar specs, which is great to achieve over mobile network, but the ping time and responsiveness of the service was terrible.

I guess that's an advantage to using a real (good) ISP than a phone company.