I have been avoiding contaminating my MacBook Pro with the Windows “operating system” like the plague. It just didn’t seem like a nice thing to do to my mac – it’s always been so good to me. That said, a little bit of convenience and a lotta bit of need for increased efficiency finally made me take the plunge. As a rule, I test the websites I build for proper layout and functionality in all the popular modern browsers. So these days that means I’m testing in IE6, IE7 and beginning to test in IE8 Beta 2 on the Windows side. I’ve typically accomplished this via a couple of old PC laptops that I’ve kept around specifically for that task. Lately though, I’ve had to be quite a bit more mobile and lugging the extra machines around with me has not been an attractive option. After considering the various scenarios for running Windows on my Mac, doing some research, and talking with colleagues in the same boat, I decided to go with VMware Fusion 1.1.3. I wish I had done it a year ago. Now I’ve basically got 3 sandboxed versions of Windows running all of the browsers I need to test in on the Windows side. I can get to them really quickly without leaving OSX and without carrying a couple of extra laptops around with me (efficient with my time and good for my back). VMware has a really nice interface, is a snap to use and has been very stable with heavy use over the last couple of days. In my opinion, its well worth the 80 bucks. Hope this is helpful for someone out there in a similar situation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 12:04 am and is filed under Life & Times, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.