Fusion 2 review

Virtualisation on the Mac is still a two-horse race, between Parallels and VMWare Fusion.

Now that Fusion has reached version 2, it promises better support for shared folders, the ability to directly open Windows .exe and installer files from the Mac OS X Finder, and to do the reverse, so that file types you'd rather only ever use in Mac OS X applications (perhaps because you don't own the PC equivalent) are sent back to your machine's native environment.

This is impressively simple to set up, and it's all done through the Mac side of things, rather than Windows' Control Panel. Enabling shared folders - or restricting Windows' access to their Mac folders to read-only if you're security conscious - allows you to synchronise your Desktop, Documents, Music and Pictures folders. Shared applications, meanwhile, let you define which apps should handle emails, web links, RSS feeds, newsgroups and FTP. This is particularly relevant to mailto: links, as you won't want to maintain two mail files split between your Mac and the Windows virtual machine. Fusion 2 supports more than 90 operating systems, including Windows and Linux, and some experimental support for virtualisation of Mac OS X 10.5 Server (although not the client edition).

Most users will use it to run Windows, upon which many of the changes in this version concentrate - in particular 3D acceleration. But for us, this is where things went awry. We were testing on a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of memory, but that lacks a graphics card with the necessary features for successful acceleration. Unfortunately, that didn't stop Fusion imploring us to activate it, at which point the virtual machine became unstable and ran very slowly.

This is a shame on several counts: many Mac users will look to virtualisation to play games not available natively on the platform, and many Mac users will be running an incompatible machine. Sadly, VMWare doesn't detail this requirement on its site, specifying only that you need an Intel Mac and a minimum if 1GB of Ram (2GB is recommended).