Virtual. Box vs VMware Fusion vs Parallels. If you need to run Windows inside OS X, you have three options Virtual. Box, VMware, and Parallels. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and different use cases where ones better than another. Lets break down when each is best and for what. The latest PC gaming hardware news, plus expert, trustworthy and unbiased buying guides. Attribute or characteristic Solidstate drive Hard disk drive Data durability If left without power, worn out SSDs typically start to lose data after about one to. Tabtight professional, free when you need it, VPN service. Install Linux On Fusion Drive Vs Hard' title='Install Linux On Fusion Drive Vs Hard' />The Contenders. Virtual machines allow you to run operating systems like Windows inside of OS X, alongside your normal Mac setup. Once you set up a virtual machine, you install the operating system you want and you can use it right from your Mac desktop, no rebooting necessary. There are three popular options for doing this Virtual. Box Free Virtual. Box is easily the nerdiest of the three options were comparing here. Its packed with all sorts of customization options for your virtual machines, but doesnt have any fancy integration features like Parallels and VMware. Essentially, Virtual. Box allows you to create a virtual machine thatll run Windows, and thats about it. VMware Fusion7. Macs VMware Fusion walks the line between Parallels and Virtual. Box, offering up a ton of options for tweaking your virtual machine, but still providing plenty of hand holding for the initial setup process. Parallels7. 9. 9. Mac VMware Fusion and Parallels are very similar, but Parallels guides you through the installation process more closely. It also focuses on home users, who simply need an easy way to use Windows on their Mac without rebooting or getting another computer. Wed be remiss here not to also mention Boot Camp, which runs Windows on a separate partition of your hard drive. Unlike virtual machines, Boot Camp requires rebooting your computer, and you cant use both operating systems at the same time. Its a bit less convenient, but it means your Windows installation can take full advantage of your Macs hardware, giving you better performance. We wont be including it in todays showdownwhich is specifically about the different virtualization options out therebut its worth mentioning as an option for running Windows on a Mac. Now lets dig into some of the specifics of each. If youre going to invest hundreds of dollars on a television set then you want to make sure youre setting the best picture possible, but far too many of us don. Virtual machines can seem juuuuust a bit too geeky for most otherwise computer friendly people. Read more Read. Ease of Setup. Virtual machines arent like other apps. Setup goes beyond just installing the app, so the ease of the process is pretty important. Lets start with Virtual. Box, since its the most hands on of the bunch. You start by creating a virtual machine and selecting the operating system you plan to run Windows, Linux, etc. From there, youll need to tweak a bunch of system settings, including how many processor cores the virtual machine gets, how much memory and video memory it gets from the total installed in your system. Thankfully, we have a guide to help you through the whole process. Once you have all of that configured, youll install the operating system just like you would on any computer. That means youll need an installation disc, USB drive, or ISO file to install from. Both VMware and Parallels have setup wizards that guide you through the process a little more. Beyond simply installing a virtual machine, both allow you to import your Boot Camp partition if you have one, or migrate an old Windows PC to your Mac. Parallels pictured above guides you through the installation process a lot more, and youll get the option to automatically optimize Parallels for productivity or gaming. Of course, you always can move past that screen and install Windows from scratch if you prefer. Theyre all simple, though Parallels has a bit of an advantage for new users since it holds your hand throughout the process. In terms of user friendliness, Parallels was consistently the strongest of the three we tested. That makes it a great solution for anyone not interested in screwing around with settings. Dear Lifehacker. After seeing some of the interesting new features in Windows 8, I want to give itRead more Read. Additional Features That Make All the Difference. While each of these three programs do fundamentally the same thing, a handful of small features set them apart from one another. All three apps feature some type of windowed mode support see image above. This allows you to run a single Windows application in its own window on your Mac desktop, so it feels a little more like a native Mac app. VMware calls this Unity, Parallels calls this Coherence, and Virtual. Box calls it Seamless Mode. When an app is in windowed mode, you can copy and paste information between Windows and Mac apps, move and resize them, and close an app without shutting down Windows. Parallels and VMware both allow you to open up individual Windows programs directly from the Dock, which makes the whole process very easy. Virtual. Box doesnt support this feature, instead requiring you to open up the whole virtual machine to pick our your app of choice. The similarities dont stop there. If youre running Windows 1. Parallels and VMware both give you access to Cortana to issue voice commands, even if Windows isnt in focus. They also both support Direct. X 1. 0, which means they can run most games, though good performance isnt guaranteed more on that in the next section. Virtual. Box doesnt support any cool little tricks like this. Instead, it merely performs the simple task of running Windows as a whole. The feature differences between the Parallels and VMware are pretty subtle. For example, Parallels supports OS Xs Quick Look feature in Windows, while VMware doesnt. Conversely, if you happen to have a fancy new i. Mac, VMware supports 5. K monitors natively. Most of this stuff is pretty minor though, and honestly if you stripped away the logos, Id have a hard time telling a difference between the two. If you want a full comparison of everything in VMware Fusion and Parallels, Wikipedia has a handy chart thats worth a look, though its not completely up to date. Cortana is easily one of the coolest new features of Windows 1. Youre probably already familiarRead more Read. Performance and Benchmarks. Since virtual machines have to share resources with the host OS, performance is very important. Thankfully, Tek. Revue has benchmarked all three programs for a variety of tasks. The current version of VMware outperforms the others in nearly every category, while Virtual. Box is way behind its competitors. Of course, theres more to it than just that. In 1. 8 different tests, VMware took top honors in 1. Efficient Notes Free 3 0 Build 321 Portable Garage. Performance margins were typically pretty close and as a whole, Parallels tends to do best in CPU related tests where VMware does best in graphics related tests. The general trend of CPU versus graphics runs throughout their tests. Parallels tends to boot faster than VMware, transfer files faster, and saves battery life better than VMware. In turn, VMware benchmarks much higher for 3. D graphics and for gaming, especially with Open. GL. Virtual. Box consistently lags behind in both CPU and 3. D performance. The Verdict Virtual. Box for a Free, Bare Bones Experience. VMware or Parallels for an Easy to Use, More Integrated One If you just need Windows to run that one old app that doesnt require a ton of 3. D rendering or other complicated processing, Virtual. Box is what you want. Beyond that, feature wise, the two paid options are very similar, and the difference is mainly price and how many Macs you need to install on. If youre planning on running anything in 3. D or want to install Windows on more than one Mac, then go with VMware. If youre more interested in productivity software and battery life, and dont mind the one Mac restriction, then Parallels is your best bet. All of this changes from year to year, too. Parallels and VMware both require that you buy an annual license every year to get updates that pack in performance gains and feature improvements. These annual updates are great in theory, but theyre not cheap, and they come every year without fail. Make a Bootable Mac OS X 1. Lion Installer from a USB Flash Drive. Im going to walk through the process of making a bootable Mac OS X 1. Lion installation drive out of any USB flash drive key. This is similar to the process of making a bootable Lion installer DVD, but I prefer a USB flash drive because its faster, smaller, and I have a Mac. Book Air so an installation DVD isnt too useful for me. This is pretty easy to do, but I have made the walkthrough as simple as possible with plenty of screenshots, so just follow along the instructions. Requirements Got all that Good, lets proceed. Were going to assume you already have Mac OS X Lion downloaded from the App Store, if you dont, do that first. If you have anything stored on the USB flash drive youre going to lose it, so be prepared for that and back it up. First we are going to locate the Lion Install. ESD. dmg file and mount it Navigate to your applications folder. Right click or control click on the Install Mac OS X Lion. Show Package ContentsOpen the Contents directory and then go into Shared. SupportDouble click on Install. ESD. dmg to mount the Lion disk image onto your Mac desktop, it will show up like the image below. Next, we format the USB flash drive, this will become the bootable Lion installer Plug the USB flash drive into your Mac. Launch Disk Utility. Select your USB drive from the left side of Disk Utility, then click on the Erase tab. Choose Mac OS Extended Journaled as the Format, and name the USB key what you want. Click on Erase to format the USB drive. Now that the USB flash drive has been formatted to the appropriate filesystem, we are going to restore the previously mounted Install. ESD. dmg file to the blank USB drive. Right click on the USB drive in Disk Utility and select RestoreNow you need to set the source disk for the restore. This is why we mounted the Install. ESD. dmg file earlier, because we can just drag and drop the Mac OS X Install ESD image into the Source if you didnt mount the image, you can manually locate and select the image file yourself by clicking on ImageDrag the formatted USB key to the Destination and check Erase destinationBe sure you have the right things in the right places, you dont want to format the wrong drive then click on RestoreNow you wait while the Lion DMG is restored to the USB drive, this can take a while and youll see a screen like this When this is finished, your bootable Mac OS X Lion installer drive is completeYou can now boot any Lion compatible Mac with the USB drive, just plug the USB key in, hold down Option during initial boot, and select the drive. Heres what youll see upon booting with the drive connected From here you can format, restore from backups, or reinstall Lion. If youre wondering about the other drives pictured, its because I am dual booting Lion and Snow Leopard, and Recovery HD is the small recovery partition that Lion installs on its own. This process should work with a standard external USB hard drive too, but I have not tried that specifically. Advantages to making a bootable Lion USB drive You can perform a clean OS X Lion install with the USB drive. The Lion USB key drive becomes a recovery disk with access to Disk Utility, re installation, access Time Machine backups, and everything the Recovery HD partition does. You will have external media to recover and reinstall Lion in the event of total drive failure or some other catastrophe. Enjoy Mac OS X 1.