Comments on: OS X Virtual Showdown: Parallels 5 vs VirtualBox 3

By: sitrep

sitrep — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:42:00 +0000

Well, dual booting is also an option as well.

By: Gainweight339

Gainweight339 — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:53:00 +0000

Very cool I’ll install Virtual Box now.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:52:00 +0000

Nice, I’m installing Virtual Box as we speak. I’ll let you know how it works out for me.

By: Neomusashi

Neomusashi — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:42:03 +0000

For those of you who need to run games on their VM, ever considered buying a pc? I don’ t get it why so many people are always trying to run a VM on a mac just for games. If that is the only reason to buy parallels … .

By: Mylore Perea

Mylore Perea — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:24:56 +0000

Hello,

Can you provide the specs on the machine that you tested on? Is it a gth gen macbook pro? imac? etc? I’m asking because I was wondering if you found any differences in memory usage or cpu usage between the virtualbox and parallels

Thanks,

Mylore

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 14 May 2010 07:21:09 +0000

Read the Title Folks….. If ya wanna buy a Ferrari, look at the dealer outside before ya go in and start complaining.
The author gave what was promised in the Title.
What a bunch of Whiners…..sheeshhh.
Get the silver spoon outa ya mouth and grow up.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:16:13 +0000

Why the two-way?? Hard to believe you can write an article like this without mentioning VMWare …

By: jgregc

jgregc — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:56:24 +0000

I don’t understand why anyone is talking about VMWare when the title clearly states what is being compared.

I have a problem with copy and paste with Virtualbox in one direction only – from the client to the Mac. It works with Notepad occasionally, but with copying from OneNote it simply won’t do it unless I past it into Notepad first, and then it’s hit or miss. I’m thinking that Office is writing extended information to the clipboard? Also, it may be an issue with just the Mac Client? I am running the latest version, with guest additions, of course.

By: Kyle Armbruster

Kyle Armbruster — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:56:27 +0000

…What was this review meant to do? What about ease of installation, speed, printing, network activity, gaming…

And WTF… No VMware Fusion? Who uses Parallels? I mean, someone must, but every single Mac person I know uses Fusion.

By: JJ

JJ — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:09:27 +0000

Sorry, what?

Why no comparison of VMWare Fusion?

By: robert

robert — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:43:00 +0000

I use VirtualBox on OS X every day to run XP, Windows 7, and various Linux clients. I can say with certainty that plain text cut/paste works great both ways.

By: Peter M.

Peter M. — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:44:56 +0000

That cut and paste thingy works for me. I’m using V 3.1.4 of Virtual Box. Looks like you’re using an older version.

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:32:54 +0000

Just curious, did you install the guest additions portion of virtualbox? Wondering if you had that installed when you had trouble copy and pasting from the virtual machine to the host.

By: robert

robert — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:59:42 +0000

Errm… why didn’t you test a DX9 game?

Virtual Box would probably fail miserably there, while I’ve gotten Supreme Commander 2 running and looking great. There are screenshots of people running Crysis in Parallels online, even.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:56:24 +0000

I enjoyed reading this article. I previously used both VMWare and Parallels 5 but have recently switched to VirtualBox. It does the job really well and seems to run XP in a VM much better than either VMWare or Parallels.

The reviewer obviously did not do his research before writing this article. He failed to mention that importing a VM from either Parallels or VMWare to VirtualBox is very easy. In fact, if you have a VMWare virtual machine, VirtualBox is able to open the VMWare hard disk without any conversion or extra work. If you have a Parallel hard disk and want to use it in VirtualBox, the easiest thing to do is use a tool made by VMWare to convert the Parallels hard disk to a VMWare hard disk which you can open natively in Virtual Box.

Also, I was able to copy text from the guest operating system (Windows XP) back to the host (Mac OS X) but it didn’t work for a picture.

The reviewer also forgot to mention one detail that I think is pretty significant. VirtualBox is cross platform which can be a nice plus because with a big enough flash drive, you can carry an entire OS with you.