I have just tried VMware Fusion beta 2. It's a free download at the moment. I can now run XP Pro and connect to my office network and run Office. I wasn't able to do this before this beta version.
The dual monitor (or multiple monitors) feature is not as easy as advertised. I couldn't yet set all desktop on both monitors to show Windows but it's working after all in unity mode.
I have yet to run it for a prolonged period to see if it's practically usable.
Installation is a lot better comparing to experience of using VPC in Vista. It was a lot faster, smoother and without tricks here and there.
I am running a 30-days evaluation version of Fusion 1.1.3 The upgrade was also done pretty smoothly and quickly. My speakers were working under Ubuntu and my hardware wasn't complaining.
The only thing that I found not working so far is the scroll wheel of the mouse, this great tip fixed that.
These are key factors after a few days of testing.
- I tried both bridged and NAT for the NIC and tried without much success to join my office domain
- The display can be set as large as 2360 x 1770 of course that won't work, I still prefer dual monitor
- The fan of my macbook triggers every 5~10 minutes, it was under stress definitely, perhaps I should allow less RAM to XP to ease its load. There wasn't much apart from Safari running in OS X, may be Fusion took too much load in the background?
I'll wait for a better version before I invest.
