Mossberg reviews Parallels Desktop 8: Works well; superior to VMWare Fusion

“I’ve been testing [Parallels 8] for about a week,” Walt Mossberg writes for AllThingsD. “It can run older versions of Windows, such as Windows 7, which worked well for me. Because running Windows 8 is a key feature of Parallels, I spent a lot of my testing time using a pre-release version of the new Microsoft operating system via Parallels.”

“Parallels 8 does a fine job of running Windows on a Mac, especially Windows 8. It doesn’t emulate every feature, like those taking advantage of a touch screen—which the Mac lacks. But it makes Windows 8 work on a Mac pretty much like it works on a standard Windows PC that you’d upgrade to Windows 8,” Mossberg writes. “And it integrates Windows 8 with some new features of Mountain Lion, like centralized notifications and text dictation… VMware Fusion — a main Parallels competitor from VMware, a large publicly held Silicon Valley firm — also has a new version, Fusion 5, that is designed especially to handle Windows 8… I also installed and tested Fusion 5.”

Mossberg writes, “In my reviews of the last couple of editions of Parallels and Fusion, I’ve found Parallels, which claims about 70% of the Windows-on-Mac market, superior. I’m sticking with that conclusion. I found Parallels faster at every common task, like starting and restarting Windows, and resuming Windows from a suspended state… I can recommend Parallels 8 as a good solution for running Windows on a Mac simultaneously with Mac programs, and especially for Mac users who want to also use Windows 8 later this fall, or experiment with the pre-release version.”

Read more in the full article here.

Related articles:
CNET reviews Parallels Desktop 8: New features put it above competitors – September 6, 2012
Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac now available – September 4, 2012