VMware has added a ton of features to Fusion 2.0, many of them aimed at easing OS X-Windows integration. As before, you can drag and drop files and folders between Windows and OS X. But now you can also copy and paste formatted text (not just plain text) from one OS to the other.

You can also create mirrored folders: You can set up your Windows virtual machine (VM) so that its Desktop, Documents, Users, and Pictures folders are actually pointers to those same folders in OS X. When you save a document in Word for Windows to the Documents folder, for example, it'll be saved to your user's Documents folder in OS X, not to your Windows virtual machine's Documents folder. This feature is off by default.

Version 2.0 also lets you enable application sharing, which will make programs in your Windows' virtual machines visible to OS X, and vice versa. (For this feature to work, the folders in which the documents reside must be shared with the VM.) You can share Internet applications in a similar manner.

Fusion 2.0 shone in my tests with both Linux and Windows XP Pro, and Vista. The speed of typical office applications (Microsoft Office 2003 in XP Pro, OpenOffice.org in Linux) was fine, even with image-laden documents and large spreadsheets. Programs loaded quickly, and I was able to run multiple programs at once in both virtual machines without any noticeable slowdowns.

Overall CPU usage has decreased to the point at which you can leave Fusion running in the background, even with an open (idling) virtual machine. On my Mac Pro, a Windows XP Pro virtual machine sitting open in the background typically used between 3 and 8 percent of my CPU; in the prior version of Fusion, that would have typically been 10 to 20 percent.