A few months ago, I had VMware Fusion 4 installed on my Mac. I wanted to be able run the Windows versions of Word, Excel, and Outlook on my Mac. Most of my research indicated that Office 2010 programs work better with Sharepoint collaboration tools than their Office 2011 for Mac counterparts. Also, I wanted to be able to use OneNote and Access (neither of which are available for OS X). Mac OS X offers a lot of advantages, MacBooks are great pieces of hardware, and there were several Mac only programs I wanted to use along with Windows programs, thus a virtual machine system which allowed for the the operation of Windows along with Mac OS X seemed like a best-of-both-worlds solution. VMware Fusion 4 came highly recommended as the best virtual machine for the concurrent operation of Windows 7 and Mac OS X.
The requirements for Fusion said that 4GB of RAM would be sufficient to run Windows on a virtual environment in OS X. Unfortunately, when I tried to run Windows in Fusion my MacBook would become slow and unresponsive to the point of being unusable. Furthermore, running Windows based applications in Fusion's "Unity" view mode was impossible.
If you aren't familiar with VMware Fusion, Unity is the view mode in which Windows based applications are run in individual windows which look as though they are running natively in the Mac OS X environment. I.e., you open a program like Access and it looks as though its running in Mac OS X. It can be launched out of the dock, and it can be minimized to the dock as well. This is a great feature if you want to multitask with Windows and OS X based applications at the same time on the same screen. Not being able to use Unity was an impediment to my planned business use for the MacBook.
I consulted with my IT guru, who suggested that 4GB of RAM was not enough for running both Windows 7-64 bit and Mac OS X Lion. At his suggestion, I ordered two 4GB RAM modules from Other World Computing. The price for doubling my RAM to 8GB: $50.
Apparently, the lack of RAM was the problem. With 8GB of RAM, Windows 7 boots up quickly within VMware Fusion 4. Once Fusion is running, Windows programs open in Unity (from icons on the dock) about as quickly as Mac programs open in OS X. The system is quite cool, as now I can multitask with the full array of programs I use at Prism Risk Management all on one computer.
