Today I upgraded the following three major components on my macbook pro to have better Windows experience.

  1. Bootcamp 1.3
  2. VMWare fusion beta 4, build 48339
  3. Parallels 3.0, build 4124

All three components had major improvements in terms of stability, features and Bootcamp vista support. First and foremost I upgraded my Bootcamp 1.2 to 1.3; and the upgrade is very smooth and no issues and nothing.

Second, I upgraded fusion and even that upgrade went very smooth without any issues. After starting the Windows vista from bootcamp using fusion; and I noticed significant improvements to overall look and feel and performance along with unity feature (which is supposed to be the parallels coherence killer); unfortunately on my install; the unity feature is disabled. Not sure it is because of Bootcamp. But will fight with it later on.

Lastly I upgraded Parallels from 3188 to build 4124; and this version did not work with my earlier key; so need to go ahead with a trial version. First time booting to bootcamp Vista took me lot of time because it tried to install Parallels tools automatically by default along with subsequent boot time is also takes long time and the display is not as good when compared with fusion or direct boot; but overall good to see the bootcamp vista support from parallels. In a side note; when I booted through direct boot; a window pops up that Parallel tools can only be ran in virtual machine, this is a lame work from Parallels team; they should have fixed this becuase thats supposed to be a basic way that people will togle between virtual machine and direct boot.

At least things seemed to be OK for time being. Currently am settled with Fusion.