Re: Win4Lin vs. VMWare (Was: Re: Win4Lin futures)

From: Crashdamage (03z1krd7_at_nospam.invalid)
Date: 02/28/04 

Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 04:35:39 GMT

On Sat, 28 Feb 2004 03:39:35 GMT, Kenny McCormack
<gazelle@yin.interaccess.com> wrote:
> In article <a3b4261a9cf43cba35654e0e0c00d8ab@news.teranews.com>,
> Crashdamage <03z1krd7@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 17:48:20 -0500, General Schvantzkoph
>><schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Does anyone know if/when Win4Lin will support Win2K/XP? Windoze software
>>> vendors are going to stop supporting Win9x pretty soon and I really really
>>> don't want to have to boot into Windows to run Quickbooks.
>>
>>You don't need to worry. Win 9x will be supported for quite a while
>>yet. Something like 30-40% of the Windows desktops are still using it,
>>and no big software company like Quicken will want to lose that big a
>>market. Even Microshaft saw that Win9x wasn't going away anytime soon
>>and recently extended support for Win98 for another couple of years.
>>
>>Netraverse (Win4Lin) is one kick-ass software company with the best
>>customer support I've ever seen. They say they're working on Win2k/XP
>>support, and when they say they're working on something, you can bet
>>they are. They're not gonna miss out on a market that large, either.

> Just out of curiosity, how does Win4Lin comare these days with VMWare.

> I checked out Win4Lin a couple of years ago, and it didn't seem to be the
> real deal (basically, seemed to be in about the same league as Wine).

> VMWare is the real deal. But it is pricey.

Well, Win4Lin is definitely in another class from using Wine.
I checked out VMWare and Win4Lin when I made the move to Linux about 3
years ago. Tried VMWare 1st and was very disappointed, especially with
the stability and speed. I probably could've worked out the stability
problems, but it was obviously always gonna be slow. I thought I'd
found the real deal when I loaded Win4Lin, and I've used it ever since.
I've long ago gone native Linux at home for almost everything, but I
still need Win4Lin for running IE to work with a couple of websites
that insist on it, pcAnywhere now and then, and TaxCut once a year.

For most purposes, Win4Lin kicks VMWare all over the screen.
Super-slick installation, and unlike VMWare, it was immediately
rock-stable (so stable it almost makes Win9x seem like a reasonable OS),
much lighter on resources, and ran Win9x fast - roughly as fast as
native Windoze, sometimes even faster - yeah, **faster**. VMWare will
never be able to do that, by the very nature of the differences in how
the systems work.

VMWare was originally written as a developer's platform, and that's
still what it's best suited for. Unless you need some particular
functionality in VMWare that's not in Win4Lin (not much, other than
support for WinNT and DirectX, and Win4Lin already has partial DirectX
and they're working hard on WinNT and full DirectX), I can't think of a
good reason to spend $300 for VMWare. And like I said, Win4Lin customer
support is the BEST! 

-- 
Registered Linux user #266531

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