I haven’t seen it yet, but ZDNet’s Ed Bott has - the teaser image below on Microsoft’s home page that, when you click on it, takes you to a section on the website called Windows Vista: Look how far we’ve come.

I’ve been using Vista in one edition or another since April 2007 and did some of the early beta testing. Largely, I’m pleased with it, even in the face of some pretty bad experiences last year, resolved thanks to Dell a few months ago.

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After many years of using a PC, I’ve finally switched to a Mac and am now running Microsoft Windows Vista within the VMware Fusion environment. I have heard from a bunch of people that it’s better than Parallels. Anyway, be that as it may, can you tell me how to install the VMware Tools, which apparently I need?

Dave’s Answer:

I’ve used both Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion for quite a while and have had generally good success with both of them so I don’t know that one is dramatically better than the other. One good thing: both companies are determined to win this race so both are constanlty pushing out updates, tweaks and performance enhancements, which is a great boon to customers.

Having said that, I will also say that my experience with Windows Vista is that it requires so many resources that it’s a tough operating system to run with any sort of decent performance within a virtualization environment. I have much better luck with Windows XP, as do most Mac users who need to delve into the PC universe on occasion.

The good news is that the general steps required to install the VMware tools — which let the Windows OS interact more successfully with your Mac peripherals and lets you have any arbitrary size window as your Windows screen size — is the same for just about any version of Windows you might want to run.

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