VMware Fusion [OLD VERSION]

I am amazed at how seamless this product makes everything work together. My first virtual machine is running XP, and have no issues whatsoever. When I installed Fusion, the first thing it did was go out an upgrade to 2.0. Since I had no prior experience with the product, I figured what the heck. It went so well, and works so well, that I told others here at work that were hesitant to upgrade to go ahead. They too have nothing but good things to say. I am not a power user of XP (only using Quicken and a few other small programs), so I have not observed any issues related to CPU/Disk IO/Memory usage.

I've been using the competitors product for awhile on some other Macs. I heard good things about VMfusion and tried it out. Its snappy easy to install and gets the job done no muss no fuss. Great product

I love this product, and the fact that it allows me to run windows on my mac is great. It does not slow my laptop down at all. I would recommended this to anyone that has a mac to go ahead and buy the program that way if a program only runs on windows you have the capacity to do so.

VMWare does a solid job of fulfilling its stated goals, except that it does NOT run Windows/Dos games well at all.

I'm not completely new to Mac, but many of my Windows PC apps are not available for Mac. I thought this would be the answer to make my conversion to Mac affordable and productive. So far, in the past 4 days since I created my virtual Win machine (VMWare v. 2 - the product I purchased on Amazon is v. 1, and you get a free downlaed update to v.2) on my MacBook Pro, 4 GB ram, 2.5 Ghz, I have a grand total of 1.2 hours of actual productivity. The rest of the time (35+ hours) is spent waiting for the Virtual Windows machine to respond to keystrokes and mouse clicks.
Not being a complete dummy, I figured my settings were not quite right, so I scoured the online support features, data bases and forums for solutions. Based on the discussion there, I am NOT the only one with this problem. I have made the suggested modifications to the settings that were recommended on the web site, and every variation and combination thereof, only to have the VM power up and be blazing fast until I suspend the virtual machine, or the Mac goes to sleep or the screen saver starts. This is a laptop, so energy savings are a priority. . . hibernating is a fact of laptop life.
Taking over 2 hours to shut down Windows in the virtual machine is NOT ok. Neither is having to restart the Mac and VM four or more times a day. And every time I restart Windows, I am requested to install and then update VM Tools. . .why?
I will be trying tech support tomorrow because they aren't open now and they don't have online support, but right now I am so frustrated and annoyed that I bought this product AND my new MacBook based on the reviews for this product and they don't come close to being useful or reliable. As I have been writing this review, it has taken 12 minutes to boot up the windows virtual machine. I am not a happy camper.