[Discussion] [MAC] Virtual Software

[D Burch]

When I bought my MAC Mini 18 months ago, I picked up a copy of VM Ware 
Fusion so I could run the odd win application. At the time I knew 
nothing and the kid sold my everything knew little about talking to the 
dark side.
VM Ware has been ok, it gets me through tax time and gives me access to 
some old outlook email and access files. The only other win app I really 
want to get back to is Visio. There just is not anything in the Mac 
world that comes close to its functionality.

I have grumbled before about  Mac OS X memory management, although I 
admit that I do not understand it or the swapping function. I just know 
that from a clean boot, a lot of little TSR type things load and don't 
unload very quickly.  I guess Apple are liking making lots of money 
rather than doing a great job any longer.

Any way, I started paying with Crossover from CodeWeavers. It isn't 
100%, but it seems pretty good at handling the basic business 
applications - MS Office in particular.

When I launch VM Ware, the base program uses 45-50 MB of memory. Once 
the virtual machine loads, another 700 MB is used! Crossover on the 
other hand uses about 60 MB for the base app, but I cannot see where the 
actual application - Word, Outlook etc, uses a lot more.

Virtual Box, thanks Chuck for the reference, requires a little over 200 
MB for an OS/2 Warp 4.52 machine. Once I get to ECS 2.0 GA, I will advise.

Don Burch