Parallels also offers a couple of features that make it more user-friendly than Fusion. One of those is clipboard support, allowing you to copy and paste between Mac and Windows applications. This makes working between the two operating systems much more seamless.

Overall, both Parallels and Fusion rate well in the ease-of-use category -- or will once some of the reliability issues are worked out during Fusion's development.

Advanced configuration

Parallels offers a much broader set of options for advanced configuration. Fusion currently allows for configuration of shared folders, the use of a single hard drive image file, sound, CD-ROM access (read-only) and some basic network options.

In contrast, Parallels provides the ability to specify more granular virtual hardware information as well as the use of a disk image to mimic the functionality of a floppy drive. Parallels also offers the ability to clone or re-create with a different maximum size the hard drive image of a virtual machine. (Both applications use dynamically expanding hard drive images, but both also require a maximum size be set for the image when it is created.)