When I purchased my new MacBook Pro I knew I would have to still require the ability to run Windows like I did with PPC Powerbook. I ordered Parallels mainly because it had such high reviews and VMWare was very much still in Beta.


Through almost a year of use I have been 90% satisfied with Parallels. As a new update was released you could see the product getting better and better.


Yesterday I switched to VMWare Fusion mainly because Parallels has a very serious issue with USB connectivity to devices that are sensative to the connection like cell phones. I have a Blackberry Curve and I could not sync it with my parallels machine no matter what I did. I took that exact same Parallels image and converted it over to VMWare Fusion using the VMWare Import tool and now I was able to sync my Blackberry.


Now I have noticed some other issues with VMWare that I have to decide if I can live with. VMWare does tax the CPU of my MacBook Pro way more then Parallels ever did (monitoring using GeekTools). Since usiing VMWare Fusion it feels as though my entire system lags a bit but if I go back to Parallels then I loose my USB sync'ing ability for my phone and that's pretty important. Then again the lag is a drag.


Currently undecided but feature wise they are very even with each other. I like them equally for features but I do prefer parallels at the moment for performance reasons but can't live without that Blackberry sync'ing

I learned that a big disadvantage to Parallels is in embeds itself in Mac OS X.  Even if you uninstall Parallels you will find that if you right click on a file and click Open With you will see references to Parallels programs no matter what tutorial you follow.  It's very very annoying.  I switched back to VMWare Fusion because recently I have been experiencing lockups with parallels and my MacBook Pro was acting funny and giving me issues. As soon as I removed Parallels my MacBook resumed its normalcy.