I tested these three games using my 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro under OS X: Lord of the Rings Online, EverQuest 2, and Age of Conan. Of the three, Lord of the Rings Online ran the best, Age of Conan ran the worst, and EverQuest 2 ran “just ok.” Parallels 7 still does just Direct X 9, so games like Lord of the Rings that take advantage of Direct X 11 won’t run perfectly.

For benchmarks, I used my current Windows-on-a-Mac gaming setup, which involves both Apple’s own Boot Camp utility (which lets you run Windows natively) and CrossOver (which lets you run Windows apps in OS X without actually installing the Windows OS itself).

The good

The last time I looked at Windows gaming on the Mac, Parallels’s performance noticeably lagged behind the frame rates I got in CrossOver. With Parallels 7, frame rates in both were much closer, getting around 50 FPS in LotRO and 35-40 in EverQuest 2. And since you’re running games in basically a native environment, unlike in CrossOver, you can get games up and running with a minimum of fuss. CrossOver often requires extra configuration and patience to get games running. Also, if you’re close to filling up your Parallels drive, it’s easy to resize it.

I didn’t notice any obvious performance differences between Parallels accessing a Boot Camp partition or Parallels running off its own .pvm file (Parallels’ own native Windows installation container). Both seemed to give me the same frame rates and load times. Even when I put Parallels into a position for it not to succeed, like playing a game while using Handbrake to convert a video file, my MacBook didn’t come to a girding halt. While it was slower, I could still play the game.

The bad

I noticed one consistent issue in playing all the games: right-clicking with the trackpad to look around was uncontrollable. If I plugged in an external mouse, its right button worked just fine. I could get around this problem by adjusting my keybindings in-game to something funky like pressing alt-contol-arrow button, but that’s really a pain to get used to.

Also, you’re going to take a performance hit running in a virtual environment. Running the games in anything other than Full Screen mode (you can still alt-tab or Mission Control back to your OS X apps) in Parallels seemed to cause problems. I had numerous issues loading games past their login screen in Coherence mode; the same problems didn’t crop up nearly as often in Full Screen.

If you play any game or in any situation where reflexes or timing really matter, like a multiplayer shooter or during a raid in an MMO, I can’t recommend a virtualized solution at all. In those cases, you’ll need to be running the game in Boot Camp (or, OS X if you’re lucky and that’s an option).

The ugly

The bane of my computing existence is Windows’ activation process. Given the nature of my freelance work, I’m often blowing my activation limit and need to call Microsoft to get it reset. If you use Boot Camp and create a Parallels virtual from that, you’ll use up two activations.

Also, of all the games I looked at, Age of Conan ran horribly on Parallels, averaging out to about 8 FPS. I was getting 25 in Boot Camp, so it’s not like it’s a stellar performer anyway. I also noticed the avatars in Conan weren’t smooth, as I could see the polygons that made up their shapes under the skinning when running the game in Parallels.

Final thoughts

I’m pretty happy with Parallels 7 for gaming. Having current hardware has a lot to do with it, but Parallels seems to at least come close to the performance I’m used to from CrossOver, without the hassles. After a week or so of testing, I’m going to delete my CrossOver game installs and instead use Parallels for Windows gaming, and Boot Camp when I need to get really serious.

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• Launch Time: Run Windows applications 41 percent faster than Parallels Desktop 5
• Enhanced 3D Graphics: Enjoy more life-like visual action and play a wider range of modern games with 40 percent improvement over Parallels Desktop 5

Earlier this year, I wrote a lengthy evaluation of gaming on virtual machines. I thought I’d run the same games through Parallels 6 to see how its claims work out in the real world. Before we get going, though, one quick note: upgrading to this version will force your copy of Windows to re-authenticate, so, if like me you’re near your limit, be warned.

The Test Bed

The fine print. These tests were run on a MacBook Pro 13″ with 4GB of ram, 500GB hard drive and an NVIDIA 9400M graphics chip. The release version of Parallels Desktop 6 was used — at least the version that was available on September 9 — with Windows 7 Professional (the virtual machine was accessing the boot camp parition) with all the latest service patches as my OS of choice. The games tested were Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and EverQuest 2. These were scientifically chosen from a pool of games that, frankly, are the ones I play a lot. Also, MMOs tend to be the most demanding of games so they make great test subjects. Also, note: Lord of the Rings Online has gone free-to-play, and this or Boot Camp are the only ways to run it currently on a Mac.

Claim One: Improved Launch Times

For the most part, the claims held true. Without breaking out a calculator, I did find the load times for games to be better on Parallels 6 over Parallels 5. Interestingly, EverQuest 2 was slightly longer on the load times with version 6. The OS itself took exactly the same time to load on both versions. The oddity I mentioned in the earlier article, where it took Parallels longer to launch on a clean boot of OS X, still holds true.

Claim Two: Increased Performance

After seeing increased load performance, I expected to also see much better FPS. Now, the FPS tests aren’t scientific; none of the games have a true benchmark test. If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have run Speedmark tests on both versions. However, I’ve never really trusted the benchmark tests over actual in-game observations.

I did not see the increased performance Parallels was claiming. The tests were pretty much a wash, with both versions testing within any margin of error of each other. They may appear slightly better or slightly worse than the previous version, but statistically it’s a wash.

The Intangibles

Version 6 has support for 64-bit and 5.1 surround sound. Frankly, I couldn’t tell a difference with the 64-bit support and I don’t have 5.1 surround on my MacBook.

Conclusion

Before version 5, upgrading Parallels quickly became a regretted decision. It felt like things were worse, not better, and I’d have a host of performance-related issues. That’s changed, and after an afternoon with Parallels 5 I don’t regret upgrading.

That said, I can’t really tell a difference. It does feel slightly more responsive, but I can’t measure how. I really wish there was quantitative way to say “It’s snappier!”

Do I recommend upgrading if you’re a gamer? Yeah, I do. While “It didn’t make things worse” is hardly an enthusiastic recommendation, I’ll be the first to admit that testing three games by two different developers is an incredibly small sample set. That said, since upgrading is a one-way street (I’ve never had much luck backing down a version), I can’t recommend checking the Windows Guest forums at Parallels’s official site before upgrading. There is no shame in letting people like myself be your canaries.

For 90 percent of my daily toil, OS X is the best platform for me. I use it during my day job, freelance writing, school, graphic design, and the usual goofing off everyone does. However, there is one glaring desire missing: I play Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs), and the Mac-native offerings are slim. I’ve had to result to running games in emulators, virtual disks, and Boot Camp partitions, and after running some numbers I thought I’d share my findings with you.

The Games

I play the following MMOs: World of Warcraft, EverQuest 1 and 2, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons and Dragons Online. Of these, only WoW and Warhammer have native clients. Which means I’m forced to use some sort of emulation to play them. A commenter  on Liam’s Windows 7 piece said, “You bought an Apple computer so use the Apple software. If you want it so bad go buy a PC.” For me, Apple and OS X are fantastic for my productivity needs, but when it comes to gaming, sadly, it’s still a Windows world.

The Emulators

Fortunately, all is not lost. Once Apple went to Intel chips, running Windows in some sort of emulation became possible. For a gamer like myself, it became a saving grace that let me enjoy OS X for my daily usage, but lets me have my games and play them, too. For the purposes of testing, I played games in the following programs:

• CrossOver Games 8.1.3. CrossOver is a Wine-based emulator, so you’re not actually running any Windows code; it’s all handled via the app.
• Parallels Desktop 4 version 4.0.3848 with a Windows 7 virtual,
• Windows 7 running in Boot Camp on OS 10.6.2. Unfortunately, Parallels can only access a Boot Camp partition officially supported by Apple, so I was unable to test Parallels directly accessing Boot Camp.

These were all tested on a 2.26 GHz 13″ MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and at native 1280×800 resolution.

The Results

Costs
For Boot Camp, Windows 7 Home Professional is $199.99. CrossOver Games is $39.99.  Parallels is easily the most expensive. Windows 7 Home Professional is $199.99 and Parallels is $79.99.

Setting Things Up

Boot Camp: This is the easy one. Since Boot Coomp runs Windows natively, installing all the games tested was very easy — albeit time consuming since they each had to be downloaded off the net.

Parallels: Again, very straight forward. The process takes a little longer since it’s running in a virtual environment, and Parallels needs to install the Parallels Tools after the setup. I had no issues installing the games. Really, for all intents and purposes Parallels is just like running Windows.

CrossOver: Well, the install is quick — you just install CrossOver like any OS X program. Getting the games to run…well, that’s a different story. While there’s a decent compatibility listing on Codeweaver’s site, since CrossOver is a Wine emulator results are very mixed. If an app has a Gold rating from Codeweaver, it’ll install and run well. Unfortunately, none of the games I tested received Gold ratings so installation was challenging. With DDO and Lord of the Rings, the actual installer won’t work; you’ll have to download the full client off a third-party site. After that, a program called Pylotro is required to launch the game — it’s a custom front end someone wrote to handle the launcher duties. There’s no guarantee an installed game will keep working, either; a previously working EQ2 broke in a patch of CrossOver.

Load Times

Frankly, the load times were the biggest source of agony during my tests. Not because of the load times, but because the results were hard to sort out because of a lot of variables. Every game is an online-based game, so, to get my character in the game I had to pass an authentication server, several load screens and a character select. Therefore, Internet latency and a whole host of issues come to play.

Here’s how I got the numbers. I loaded all the games and timed from when I started and stopped when I was able to control my character in-world. With Parallels and Boot Camp I also added the boot times of the required OS to the chart. I did this three times and averaged the results.

I did notice an odd thing in Parallels: if I rebooted my Mac, the load times for both the OS and the game were significantly longer. However, after further testing I noticed that if I loaded Parallels/Windows 7 and immediately launched a game, the load results were almost double the value above. If I let the OS “sit” for a few, the load times were normal. Rather than report those numbers, I’ll just say this: a watched OS never loads — go get your beverage and snacks while Parallels loads and by the time you’re done the game will load faster.

In-Game Performance

Boot Camp: Unsurprisingly, the performance here was the best. At high I was getting around 40 FPS, and the game just flew. No issues.

Parallels: I’m actually amazed gaming performance under Parallels was decent. With graphics settings on High (but shadows turned off) I was getting around 20 FPS average. Turning down options like view distances got the FPS closer to 30. I noticed no major issues outside of a slight stutter when loading a crowded area. Both windowed mode and full-screen worked fine. As an added bonus, you can set Parallels to share your OS X and Windows home directories, so any screenshots I took went right into my OS X Documents folder for easy viewing.

CrossOver: The performance was about half-way between Parallels and Boot Camp. I was getting just over 30 FPS in the games. There were, however, some significant trade-offs. Neither DDO or LotRO handle windowed mode well — once the window loses focus, you can’t click inside the window when you get back to it. Also, there’s a big issue with LotRO where the screen will go black forcing a reboot. I was able to get around both issues by forcing the virtual to run in a window. The game would think it’s full screen, but the OS treated it as a window. This way I could have access to Skype and if LotRO crashed it didn’t take the entire OS down with it. As I mentioned earlier, a previously working EverQuest 2 install broke with a recent patch release of CrossOver.

Conclusions

I used to be a huge fan of CrossOver due to its overall speed and low footprint. However, I’ve had enough and will be deleting the files. The final straw was EverQuest 2 breaking. While it’s cheap, getting a lot of games running is a gigantic hassle and there’s no guarantee they’ll keep working. As an aside, the community on the official forums is very helpful, and just about every issue someone’s had is at least addressed, even if there’s no solution.

For now, I’m running my games in Parallels. While the performance isn’t as great as in Boot Camp, the convenience of not needing to reboot is a big bonus for me. Often, I’ll game when taking a break from a project and I’d like to not have to reboot. As an added bonus, it’s very easy to resize the virtual disk in Parallels. It took less than 5 minutes to add another 32GB to the virtual disk (in Boot Camp, I’d have to repartition and reformat). I’m really surprised at how well these games ran in Parallels. Version 5 claims to add better support for Shader Model 3, so I’m planning on upgrading.

I’m not deleting the Boot Camp partition, though. Once Apple releases official support for Windows 7, I plan on re-paritioning it to a 100GB partition and have Parallels access that directly. That’ll cover me for the best of both worlds: for every day gaming, I can load Parallels, but if I need it, I can reboot and use the same install files in Boot Camp.

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Hot on the heels of the release of VMWare Fusion 3, the folks at Parallels have released Parallels Desktop 5, matching the features of VMWare Fusion 3 and adding some new ones to boot. You can get a quick overview of the newest features in the Parallels press release.

Parallels Desktop 5 costs $79.99 for the full package, or $49.99 to upgrade from either Parallels Desktop 3 or 4. Parallels is also offering a free upgrade key for those who bought Parallels 4 after Oct. 1. This is also valid for Parallels 4 purchases up until Dec. 31. Customers must retrieve this before Jan. 15, 2010.

Besides the obvious two features, fully supporting Snow Leopard and Windows 7, some of the awesome new features are best shown in screenshots.

Finally we have the Aero interface! This works in all view modes, not just full screen.

When in fullscreen mode, you can now configure a HotCorner to easily switch back to the OS X side with just your mouse.

The new Crystal View is a modified Coherence view, hiding all icons in the Dock and the OS X Parallels menu bar, moving access to menu items and a newly created folder icon in the Dock containing all your windows shortcuts.

The new MacLook feature automatically installs a custom Windows Theme (similar to those offered by products such as StarDocks’ Window Blinds) giving all your windows applications an OS X look and feel.

If you combine MacLook with Coherence View or Crystal View, the lines between native OS and virtual OS become even more blurred.

More importantly than all of that, its super fast. For me, it’s much much faster than VMWare Fusion 3. For the last few months, I’ve been in the closed beta program for Parallels 5, and the lack of communication and new builds had made us a bit weary. Sure enough, yesterday it released version 5 with none of the testers having a clue, and there are some new features we’d never seen (such as MacLook, multi-gesture support and Crystal view).

When VMWare Fusion 3 was released, I downloaded the trial and was impressed at how easy it was to migrate a copy of my Parallels Windows 7 VM over to Fusion. I wasn’t as impressed, however, at the sluggish performance of VMWare Fusion 3 when the VM loaded up. Running MS Access 2007 and Visual Studio windows became lethargic. The same operations under Parallels 5 just flew along with no issues. It’s important to note that I had the same basic VM configuration across both (1.5GB RAM, 1 CPU allocated), using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit edition. Your mileage may vary, as this was most certainly not a scientific comparison study.

Parallels has also published a video of Parallels Desktop 5 in action.

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A Russian business newspaper is reporting today that venture capital firm Almaz Capital Partners acquired a 5 percent stake in popular virtualization software vendor Parallels. The stake was purchased from its previous owners, Insight Venture Partners, for $11 million.

The fund used to finance Almaz’s purchase was seeded in July of last year with $30 million from networking infrastructure vendor Cisco. While there’s no word on what led Almaz to invest specifically in Parallels, reports indicate “plans to invest $100 million in growth stage Russian software and IT companies over the next year.”

Consumer- and enterprise-level virtualization is a hot topic in the tech community these days, with Parallels, VMware Fusion, and Apple’s Boot Camp all vying for the top spot in the hearts of users wanting multiplatform capabilities on their Macs. Though Fusion edged out Parallels in our comparison, Parallels gained ground in a recent major update that includes experimental support for Windows 7 and supports Snow Leopard as primary and guest operating system.

Running QuickBooks for Windows in a virtual machine (VM) on your Mac is often the best way to get all the advanced features of QuickBooks that are only available in the Windows version and still have fun using your Mac the way nature intended, running OS X Leopard. If you choose to go this route, here are a few tips and tricks to help you run QuickBooks smoothly inside a VM.

Clean Installs Are Always Best

I know it’s tempting to just run VMware Converter or Parallels Transporter and just suck the contents of your current PC into a VM. For many of us, we only really need to run one or two critical Windows applications and everything on our old PC is way more than we really need. In that situation, you’ll thank me later for telling you to take the time to set up a clean and lean VM that does exactly what you want it to do, without all the cruft and junk that often creeps into a Windows install. Load Windows, load your anti-virus software, and load QuickBooks.

Always Quit the App

Suspending your VM is a fantastic way to cut down the time it takes to relaunch later. Suspending a VM is a lot like putting your computer to sleep; the current state is saved and the VM is ready to pick up right where you left off. In order to do this for a VM, the contents of RAM for the guest OS are written to a file and then restored when the VM is opened again. The problem is that sometimes restoring the contents of RAM doesn’t work right. In this event, you must restart the VM and whatever you were working on (that hasn’t been saved to disk) is lost.

While I often suspend a VM when I’m done with it, I always quit my running applications so that they have a chance to write their data files to the VM disk file and close them properly. This is especially important with QuickBooks. You really don’t want a problem with restoring a suspended VM to hose your company file. You are always better off to quit QuickBooks so it can close its data file properly and then suspend the VM. If the OS cannot be restored, at least the QuickBooks file in the virtual disk is still good and you have a much better chance of rebooting your VM and finding that all is still perfectly fine with your accounting info.

If you want to access your virtual disk from the Mac side when the VM is not running, then you will probably want to shut down the VM too so you can use VMDK Mounter for VMware Fusion or Parallels Explorer to mount the virtual disk to the Mac desktop.

Use Shared Folders for Backups

Backups of QuickBooks company files are so important that the ability to create them can be automated to run every time you quit the application. I can’t stress enough how important it is to enable this feature and make a backup copy every time you use the application. Here’s my absolute favorite trick for using this feature in a VM: point the backup location to a shared folder that is visible on the Mac side. I usually recommend that you create a folder called “backup” or “quickbooks” in your Documents folder on the Mac side. Configure your virtualization software to allow the guest OS to have read/write access to this folder. Now you can tell QuickBooks to write its backup file to this shared folder every time you run the app. Don’t let Windows have read/write access to your entire Home folder though. A virus may cause Windows to randomly delete or rewrite files and you want to limit the potential damage.

Why do this? Well, now you have a backup of your company file that is accessible to the Mac side of your computer. Because the virtual disk itself appears as a huge monolithic file to the Mac, you may want to exclude it from Time Machine so that you don’t save copies of this 6-8GB file every hour. If you have a copy of your company file in your Documents folder, your Mac will take a snapshot of this file every hour and make another copy on your Time Machine drive. If you have MobileMe, you can configure the included backup application to routinely make a copy of this company file to your iDisk storage. This is a great way to take advantage of all the ways your Mac protects your files for you and apply that to your critical Windows files as well.

Best of Both Worlds

The real key here is to use the benefits of virtualization and avoid the pitfalls. These simple tips and tricks will help you enjoy running QuickBooks for Windows on your Mac and really leverage the advantages of the approach.

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QuickBooks is one of those key business applications that many people who are considering a switch to the Mac are worried about leaving behind. While QuickBooks 2009 for Mac might be the perfect answer for many, others do not want to give up some of the key features of the Windows version.

Intuit provides a list of key differences, and I think the most important ones are the industry-specific editions of QuickBooks Premier, multi-user access, and the ability to create an Accountant’s Copy of your company file. If you need any of those features, then you’ll want to continue to run the Windows version of QuickBooks.

Fortunately, there are several good methods to accomplish this feat that won’t break the bank or leave you pulling your hair out. Just remember that you are still running Windows (with one exception pointed out below). You will need to make sure that you are protected from viruses and spyware. You might be tempted to turn off networking entirely to avoid the anti-virus tax, but QuickBooks receives frequent updates over the Internet and many people use the DirectConnect features to pull down their financial statements through the intertubes as well.

Boot Camp

You can use Boot Camp, a feature of Mac OS X Leopard, to run Windows on your Mac. This solution allows you to shut down your Mac and reboot into Windows natively. You can’t use your Mac applications while Windows is running, though. In this scenario, you are running Windows on your Mac just like you would run it on a PC. Compatibility is excellent because you really are just running Windows. The downside of this approach is that you can’t take your Mac email and documents and easily copy and paste or import that information into QuickBooks. Likewise, it can be hard to get to the Windows files when you are in the Mac side unless you install MacFUSE to read the NTFS filesystem.

CrossOver Mac

CrossOver Mac is a WINE project that tricks some (but not all) Windows software into thinking that it is talking to Windows XP and passes those requests along to Mac OS X. Because of this trickery, it doesn’t work for every application. If you search the compatibility list for “QuickBooks” you’ll see that CrossOver Mac is listed as “known not to work” for the most recent versions. It could be a good choice if you are running QuickBooks Pro 2004, but not if you have already upgraded to 2007 or 2009. Since it runs in Mac OS X, you can still pull information from your email or other documents on your Mac. And since it’s not actually Windows, you don’t have to worry so much about viruses and spyware.

CrossOver Mac is $40 for the Standard version and $70 for the Pro version. A free trial is available to download, but I can’t really recommend it until it is updated to work with the latest versions of QuickBooks for Windows.

Virtualization

Virtualization provides a way to create a virtual machine (VM) where another guest OS can run inside Mac OS X. In contrast to CrossOver, you are actually running Windows inside the VM.

There are three major virtualization packages – VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, and xVM Virtual Box. The convenience of these virtualization solutions is great because you still have access to all your Mac OS X applications and features while the virtual machine is running alongside your other Mac software. You can even hide the Windows desktop and only view the QuickBooks application window itself and use Exposé and all the other cool windowing features of OS X.

While, virtualization is not a good solution for 3D design software or computer games (as these types of software want to talk directly to the hardware rather than a virtual machine), it works great for QuickBooks and is the solution that I recommend to most users. Because you are essentially running two complete OS installs on one machine, it’s best to have at least 2GB of RAM.

One potential benefit of VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop is that they both provide Windows software to convert the entire hard drive of your existing PC into a virtual machine file that you can use on your Mac. This is great if you have a nice, lean Windows install with only the files that you need to bring with you to the Mac. It’s not so great if your PC is having problems and Windows is not running well. You’ll bring all those problems with you when you create a new VM file. If QuickBooks is the only Windows software that you need to run, I would recommend a clean install of Windows, Anti-virus software, and QuickBooks in a brand new VM.

VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop are both $80 and free trials are available to download. xVM Virtual Box is a free solution supported by Sun Microsystems. Be sure to read TheAppleBlog’s take on VMware vs Parallels and our review of Virtual Box.

Remote Desktop Client

Another solution is to continue to run QuickBooks on a PC, but access it over the network from your Mac. Remote Desktop Client from Microsoft provides a simple way to remotely control a PC running Windows XP Pro or Vista Business or Ultimate and it works just like screen sharing in Mac OS X Leopard. The killer feature is local printing so you can make hard copies of QuickBooks reports using a printer that is connected to your Mac. This can be a great solution if you already have a PC running QuickBooks on a required version of Windows and you don’t want to spend any more money on virtualization software. You can still access your Mac applications and documents and transfer information back and forth between the remote PC and the Mac you are sitting at while you work. The downside is that it’s difficult to set up to use over the Internet if you travel away from the PC with a portable Mac. Remote Desktop Client is a free download.

Specific Scenarios

I need to run the multi-user version of QuickBooks.

OK. You definitely need QuickBooks for Windows. What I recommend here is buying a cheap PC and installing QuickBooks for Windows with the “Install Database Server Only” option. This PC will then host your multi-user company file(s) which you can access over your office network from other computers running QuickBooks for Windows. Now you just need to make sure that you put your backup plan in place for the company file(s) hosted on that PC. For licensing, the host computer does not count as a user if it is running in “Database Server Only” mode. Of course, if you already have a desktop PC that is running QuickBooks, you can make that the host by configuring multi-user mode. Just make sure that you leave it turned on with QuickBooks running.

As an alternative, if you already have Windows Small Business Server 2008 in your office, you could set up a second machine as a Terminal Services host and use RDC to open sessions on that machine. That way you don’t even need to install QuickBooks on each computer, just on the terminal services host machine.

I want to backup my QuickBooks data to Time Machine (or MobileMe).

One of the amazing features of Leopard is Time Machine. If you want Time Machine to grab a copy of your QuickBooks for Windows data, then I recommend you use virtualization and then configure QuickBooks to save a backup copy of your company file to a shared folder on the Mac side so it gets picked up by Time Machine. Incidentally, this also works if you are using Backup.app to make offsite copies of critical files in the cloud.

I already have Boot Camp setup and don’t want to spend more money.

Alright, alright. I won’t force you to switch to virtualization, but this is probably the only situation where I would use Boot Camp. You would have a lot more benefits with virtualization (flexibility, convenience, snapshots, accessibility of files in either environment, etc.), but I will let you keep the Boot Camp setup you have already made.

Recommendations

If you need or want to run the Windows version of QuickBooks from your Mac, each of these four methods will help you accomplish that goal. CrossOver is hard to recommend because it will not support the latest versions of QuickBooks. Remote Desktop Client works great if your PC is working fine and is sitting in the same office as your Mac. BootCamp is simple and straightforward and included with Leopard. One important consideration is that Intuit is more likely to support a BootCamp or Remote Desktop solution because you are running Windows natively, either on your Mac with BootCamp or on a PC using Remote Desktop.

Virtualization is by far the most convenient way to take advantage of the best of both worlds. However, support can be hard to come by because you are running an Intuit product in a Microsoft OS inside a 3rd party virtual machine on an Apple computer. That’s four companies that might all try to pass the buck when you have a problem or failure. That said, I’ve found virtualization to be stable, relatively fast, and easy to manage. I love that I can hide the Windows desktop and just look at the application that I need. When I don’t need that application, I can quit the VM and continue to enjoy all the merits of Mac OS X.

Frankly, isn’t running OS X why you bought a Mac in the first place? Now you can still get all your work done and play with the shiny new toys from that store with the ginormous glowing fruit sign. Ahhh, such sweet joy to have your cake and eat it too. Or at least your Mac and QuickBooks for Windows.

Since I recommend virtualization for most users, I have some tips and tricks for you to use that I will share with you. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another helping of advice on how to run QuickBooks for Windows effectively.

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You may remember that in comparing Parallels to VMware Fusion 2.0, we favored the latter fairly decisively. This doesn’t change my own opinion, but developers and others looking specifically to be able to run as many different types of virtual environments as possible might disagree.

The update contains a long list of improvements, of which new OS support is only a small part. Other new features include support for Apple remote disks, a silent start mode for Coherence, and direct dragging of Windows files to Mac apps in the Dock. Parallels also now claims increased battery life on portable Macs, owing to improvements in CPU usage. Finally, a number of speed-oriented improvements were also introduced, including DirextX 9.0 with Shaders Model 2 support, Intel SSE4 support for better media playback, and faster suspend and resume of virtual machines.

Note that VMware Fusion 2.0 does not yet support either Microsoft’s Windows 7 or Apple’s Snow Leopard, which are both still in closed developer beta. Look for support from Fusion soon, though, now that the gauntlet has been thrown by Paralells. Parallels is available for $79.99, or $49.99 if you’re upgrading from an existing version.

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This release also includes support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems and experimental 3D acceleration. Networking performance has been boosted and there have been many smaller bug-fixes and enhancements.

VirtualBox has support for a wide range of guest operating systems and there is an extensive number of live, pre-built images (VDIs) that are ready to run.

If you only have occasional need to run Windows, Linux or alternative operating systems but do not want to pay for a full VMware or Parallels license, VirtualBox is a great alternative.

Be sure to check out their Mac-specific forums if you run into any quirks or difficulties. I’ve found the community to be very helpful and responsive and run a few flavors of Linux in VDIs primarily to be able to take them anywhere (VirtualBox is cross-platform). While it does not have as extensive of an integration between the guest and host systems and there is no support for OS X virtualization yet, VirtualBox is a solid product with a promising future.

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Get 25% off automatically when you purchase VMware Fusion online, using the coupon code “FusionRocks” for a limited time only.

VMware Fusion has been my recommendation for some time because of the wide support for guest OS’s including OS X Server, but the new Parallels Desktop 4.0 release does a lot to close the gap. I imagine the coupon is motivated in part by the increased competition from Parallels 4.0 this month.

Our own Darrell Etherington wrote up a comparison of VMware Fusion 2.0 and Parallels 4.0 where he slightly preferred Fusion. Now it is even a better deal at 25% off.

The coupon expires at midnight (Pacific time) at Sunday, November 30.

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