When I first got my MacBook Pro, I mentioned that one of my primary, first priorities was to figure out a good solution for running Windows on it. Now that its been a little over a month and I’ve had a chance to play around with multiple different options, I think I’ve finally landed on a very workable solution to my Mac + Windows needs:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Windows XP Professional running through VMWare Fusion on my Mac desktop. I tried Windows Vista, I really did. I really wanted it to work, but…sadly, it just hasn’t worked out for me so far. I tried running it through Fusion, but the performance I got just wasn’t acceptable at all. Running Vista through a virtual machine just did NOT give me the performance that I need to be productive in it. So then I tried Bootcamp. That seems to work OK, but to be honest, the idea of having to log out of OS X just to login and use Windows…well, it works, and the performance is great, but its just kind of a hassle. When I’m using my Mac desktop for everything else other than development (which is pretty much it, except for blogging…I still really like and am using Windows Live Writer for that, so I do it through Windows), its just a hassle to have to reboot to login to Windows.

So I broke down and installed a Windows XP virtual machine in Fusion. And I couldn’t be more glad that I did. The experience so far has been FANTASTIC. The resources that I’ve had to give the VM to get good performance have been minimal. When I created a Vista VM, I gave it two of my four total GB of RAM, and STILL didn’t get decent performance. With XP, my VM only uses 512 MB of RAM and performs excellent, even with Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server Express and IIS running on it.

So now I just run Windows XP as an application on my Mac desktop when I’m doing development, and life is wonderful.