Just switched from Tiger to Leopard, please advise on Parallels or VmWare

Question

Hi all, I just made the switch to a new Macbook Pro (From a macbook) and thus also the switch to Leopard. I am having difficulty understanding the differences between Parallels and VmWare.
Primarily I frequently hear that Parallels does not play nice with Bootcamp under Leopard. I am hoping to explain my usage and get some assistance in deciding. I should also say that I HAVE parallels 2.5 and that was what I used with Tiger.
My main problem under that application was the inability to have windows access USB on the fly. I.e the only way parallels could use usb was by clicking it at Vitual machine start-up. Once done I could not toggle back to have OSX have USB access without shutting down the VM.
My use:
I need to be able to easily swap files between my VM (which will be XP) and OSX. I never had a problem with this, but now I am reading that Parallels 3.0 and VmWare have specific "share" folders. I am not sure how this differers from my old drag and drop method that I used before. Can anyone explain?
Another concern of mine is how taxing it seems Parallels 2.5 is on the system itself. It seems to require great resources at the cost of battery life. I had read that VmWare required far less resources. At the time VmWare was being compared to Parallels 2.5. Have things changed in 3.0? Do VmWare less resources also result in lower system performance?
Third I would love hot swappable access to USB. Is this an option on either? If not which handles USB the best? My USB uses are: Printer, USB flash key, USB connection to digital camera for downloading.
I really appreciate your time in reading this and any help I receive. Also if anyone has any good comparison links it would be greatly appreciated. I have been unsuccessful in finding any do to my not entirely understanding the VM lingo, as well as running into comparisons between "non-current" versions of these softwares.
Thank you again.
Kalel

Answer 1

I run both Parallels 3 and VMWare 1.1.1 on a MacBook Pro 17" with 4g of memory running Mac OS X 10.5.1. There are some differences between the two. Parallels has the best integration with Mac OS X. Disk folders are easily shared meaning that you can mount your Mac folders directly in Windows. Windows sees them as remote disks and will move files back and forth. You can also directly open a document in a Mac folder in a Windows application. VMWare provides a similar capability but it is harder (more steps) to set up. You can cut and paste between the two environments. Select text in a Mac application and paste into Windows or the other way around. VMWare takes advantage of the dull CPUs in the PowerBook and allows Windows to use both. Parallels uses only a single CPU--at least I've never been able to find a way to use both. I ran Windows XP under Parallels and had no problems with it at all. Lately I've been running Vista Business addition under VMWare and it is working. I did see a review (don't remember the source) that stated Parallels was better for Windows XP and VMWare was better for Vista. From my experience I agree. So far I have had no problems with USB device on either VM.
Parallels 3 is much improved over Parallels version 2 and if you have not tried it you should give it a try.
My only real complaint is having to lock up 40 g of my hard drive to hold the file with the Windows disk in it. I would really like to see the VM vendors find a way to use the Mac file system without the need to emulate a Windows hard drive.