I have tried both of the big Windows emulators for Intel Macs and have to say they both suck. When they work, it’s nice. But when they act-up, which is far too often, only a restart will fix things.

For the most part, Fusion and Parallels are easy to set-up and get going. The applications take you through the process of installing Windows, or any other OS, onto your Mac. Once installed, both are like having a Windows machine, but as an application. You can switch between Mac and Windows applications, move files, etc. I don’t have a huge need for Windows, but once in a while it comes in handy to run a few apps that aren’t on the Mac.

Then the trouble starts. For whatever reason, sometimes just launching Fusion or Parallels would result in a spinning beach ball. No problem right? Just force quit the application. No. Often force quit will not close the application. It certainly will not stop all of the processes these programs use. Only a complete restart will kill the processes and unlock the virtual drive files. Of course you could do this manually, but it would take just as long to restart the computer. 

I searched for a solution as to what may be wrong and came to a conclusion. There is no solid answer to the beach ball problem. Some people are cursed and others are not. It’s like having symptoms of an illness that you know are real, but the doctors and everyone else just tell you to take an aspirin. The un-cursed do offer all sorts of tips and ideas, but they haven’t worked. I’ve reinstalled the applications and Windows multiple times with the same level if instability.

So is it really worth it? Because they are only emulating, there isn’t 100% compatibility. Some games and apps work, others don’t. The beach ball issue is a HUGE deal breaker in my opinion. If I have to restart the computer every other time I’m going to use Windows, why am I running an emulator? I could just use Boot Camp and natively run Windows. Which is what I did.

Boot Camp partitions a piece of your hard drive for a second OS. Install Windows or Linux on that partition, and you have a dual boot machine. Even better than emulation, you have a native dual boot machine.

The file system Windows uses, NTFS, is Microsoft’s and Macs can’t natively write to those partitions. Of course there is a solution. Download install the two files below. Ta-da, full read & write to NTFS partitions. 

MacFuse and NTFS-3G

Yes, I have to restart the machine, but under emulation, I was pretty much doing the same thing with less compatibility. Maybe in a few years I’ll revisit the emulators, but for now Boot Camp is the way to go.