The boot process for virtual machines created with either Parallels or Fusion is essentially the same as the boot process for an actual PC. One difference is that Fusion provides you with a virtual BIOS configuration tool that can be used to change boot options such as the order in which the virtual machine searches for a bootable drive. For its part, Parallels manages these features through a virtual machine configuration dialog. Fusion also supports network boot from a Windows PXE server, which Parallels does not.

Although Parallels boots consistently, Fusion is prone to the occasional unexplained Windows boot failure (generally resolved by simply rebooting the virtual machine).

Ease of use

Most users will find both Fusion and Parallels easy to use and will probably never even need to adjust the configuration settings from their defaults. With their respective tool sets installed under Windows, users can easily move between the Windows and Mac OS X environments. The shared folders technique used in both applications is solid, though it took me a couple of reinstalls of the VMware Tools to get this to function properly in Fusion.

VMware delivers another option to accessing files between operating systems with its support for drag and drop of files and folders between virtual machines and Mac OS X. This is actually a much easier method than setting up shared folders, and it can be used without having to configure anything. But, as with the shared folders feature, I found that it did not always function properly. This is one of the few places where Fusion truly delivers something that every user will appreciate that Parallels does not, though this feature is slated for the next version of Parallels' software, Desktop 2.