01-09-2008, 07:50 PM
Actually, it's nothing so sinister as that. VMware does a pretty good job of creating a virtual computer for your guest OSs to run on, but for a really smooth experience, you need optimized drivers and other bits installed in the guest OS. This affects everything from mouse movement to (most important) graphics performance.
Windows runs similarly slowly until you install VMware tools. The difference is, Windows XP's graphics API (GDI) is not nearly so GPU-intensive as Quartz, so you don't notice the slowness quite so much as with a virtualized Mac OS X. I bet Windows Vista would also be quite slow without VMware tools, but I haven't tried it yet.
VMware provides tools for a huge number of OSs, from Windows to Solaris to several Linuxes. If Apple were to allow it, they would surely write tools for OS X as well, but Apple wants to sell hardware and, thus, doesn't want people virtualizing OS X on El Cheapo commodity hardware.
Windows runs similarly slowly until you install VMware tools. The difference is, Windows XP's graphics API (GDI) is not nearly so GPU-intensive as Quartz, so you don't notice the slowness quite so much as with a virtualized Mac OS X. I bet Windows Vista would also be quite slow without VMware tools, but I haven't tried it yet.
VMware provides tools for a huge number of OSs, from Windows to Solaris to several Linuxes. If Apple were to allow it, they would surely write tools for OS X as well, but Apple wants to sell hardware and, thus, doesn't want people virtualizing OS X on El Cheapo commodity hardware.