OT: notebook shopping

[Kurt Granroth]

Vaughn Treude wrote:
> It's been ages since I've played with virtualization. At the time, there 
> was a very painful performance hit. I agree, it would be the way to go 
> if you were running, for example, MS Office or Visio or QuickBooks or 
> something like that. My major concern now is, will Visual Studio work 
> with it? For development you want the system to work _exactly_ like the 
> native boot.

I do all of my Windows development using Visual Studio in Windows XP 
running on top of VMWare.  It works great!

The two keys are memory and the hard drive emulation.  I have 4G on the 
Host Linux system so I allocated 768M to the VM image.  I initially had 
it at 1G but honestly, I didn't notice a difference.  The hard drive 
emulation makes a big difference.  I did some benchmarks between a 
"sparse" drive image, a fully sized drive image, and direct partition 
access.  The sparse image was noticeably slower.  Almost unusably slow. 
  There was surprisingly very little difference between a full drive 
image and direct disk access.  In the end, since the drive image was 
more flexible, I went that route.

I'm not going to say that it's as fast as if it was native, but it's 
definitely fast enough that you probably wouldn't notice the difference 
unless you had a stop-watch.  My development is around 85% Linux and 15% 
Windows, though.  If it was closer to 50/50 or even skewing in favor of 
Windows, then maybe I would use Windows natively.

Really, the only thing that VMware sucks at is games.  Don't expect that 
any games will work.  That way, when one does, you can be pleasantly 
surprised.  You won't be surprised very often.

One final thing: if you do get a MacBook, you'll have a choice between 
Parallels and VMWare Fusion for virtualization.  Go with VMWare. 
Parallels has some nice ideas and I'm all for supporting the little 
guy... but I've heard far too many horror stories surrounding Parallels 
to recommend it.  Fusion is as rock-solid as all the other VMWare 
products (and extremely well integrated with OS X).

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