I must the admit that the number of times I actually boot into windows has diminished drastically What's this 'windows' you speak of? I use VirtualBox for alternative operating systems!:-P Actually, I did setup one Windows 7 VM so my wife could use an educational CD she needs. Other than that, I haven't found a lot of reason to use Windows on my Mac. I imagine I would have a few more if I didn't have an older Windows XP desktop hanging around, but even that tends to run cross-platform software.

(Even Microsoft Office has been successfully replaced with OpenOffice!) All told, the age of Windows lock-in is fading rapidly. Just about all native software these days either has a Mac version or a good Mac alternative available. Interestingly, FireFox shows markedly better graphics performance on the Mac over the PC. I haven't figured that one out yet.:-/.

Starting with version 2.1, the VirtualBox Guest Additions for Windows contain experimental hardware 3D support. With this new feature, if an application inside your Windows guest uses 3D features through the OpenGL programming interfaces, these will not be emulated in software (which is slow), but instead VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's 3D hardware.

Biz & IT — The latest virtualization showdown—Parallels Desktop 9 vs. VMware Fusion 6 A Start8 menu for Windows, IT security, and even improved gaming show up this year. Thanks to the common VMware platform, VMs can be easily transferred from the vSphere data center to the Mac desktop and then run in Fusion. Develop and Test for Any Platform Fusion makes it simple to test nearly any OS and app on a Mac.

Install mozilla firefox for mac. This works for all supported host platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris), provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place. Both products fail miserably at running anything older than XP. VMWare still wins here, since at least it manages to install and run 98SE successfully, while Parallels install suffers from endless crashes. But even a trivial DX game like 'Lose your marbles' results in a blank screen, while it works perfectly fine in VPC for Mac on 5 year old hardware. Excel new paragraph within a cell. There are many older applications and games that do not run on XP. Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM? Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM?

Well, [dosbox.com] does a decent job. But that's a self-supported donationware project. To include that sort of functionality in a commercial product, you have to hire people not only to do the development and tweaking, but to support customers who use the feature. Just not worth it for companies like Parallels and VMware to go to all that trouble for a few customers that want to play abandonware games.