Windows under OSX86

Now that i have leopard running and installed quite a lot of programs, i still miss some software that just is not available under apple's os. A few examples :

• Good usenet program with build in search like usenet explorer just does not exsist
  
• Quicken ; i use the 2002 version where with my financial data of the last 8 years
  
• FTD : fill threads database, dutch program to keep track of latest usenet releases
  

After reading quite a lot of forum posts on windows within osx, i decided to install parallels. Altough it works quite well, it does not feel all that fast. Luckily it's competitor, vmware fusion, is quite a lot faster. 

Installation of fusion is very quick and easy, after that depending on mostly your systems ram you can install xp or vista under fusion. If you have 2gb ram, like my system, i suggest you install the latest xp. With 4 gigabyte of ram or more in your system, you could just as well install a version of vista.

Fusion has a fully automatic mode to install windows, you fill in the options and the serial number and it does a quick unattend install. After everything completes vmware also installs it's runtime tools fully by itself. The last step, as usual with windows, is a lengthy download from windows update to get the latest updates. Or you could find a slipstreamed version with the sp3 service pack of course...

Xp under fusion is amazingly fast, considering it runs on a virtual machine. I have a test setup running with xpsp2 pro with nod32 antivirus and the above mentioned programs. It feels almost as fast as a normal xp install. Fusion even has an expirimental directx9 support, so you could try a few 3d games to see how they perform. Currently it's missing shader support so i doubt that it's of much use with the latest and greatest, however it is a start unliky parallels.

As long as there are some programs that just do not have an equivalent under osx, you will have to run a windows of some sort. Boot camp is great, but you will have to go through a full os shutdown and restart every time. With fusion you get a very good performing virtual machine that runs xp just fine. Only 3d games will still force you to go the bootcamp route.