New to OS Virtualization, what's best to use?

[Mugwumper]

Originally Posted by ElDiabloConCaca

Both Parallels and VMWare's Fusion will do ActiveX.

Microsoft's "Windows Update" site for updating Windows works through both of these when you're running Windows, and Windows Update uses ActiveX controls.

Hola Senor ElDiablo ;^)

Thank you for your firm belief that either will allow ActiveX controls to
work. I am in a similar situation to "sgould" . . .

My situation also involves needing to connect to Windows Small Business
Server 2003. At the moment, I'm borrowing an Acer Aspire running
Vista Home Pro, and using IE. The first step is to login to a Remote
Workplace web site, and then connect to an "application-sharing server".
Voila! I'm immediately transported back to the compute world of 2003,
complete with just a blue screen and low-res icons . . . ;^)

Anyway, the question I have is whether a Fusion solution on an Intel
iMac (or maybe a MacBook Pro) will be able to deal with this Rube
Goldberg contraption. Let's see - I'm emulating a remote PC environment
on an emulated PC environment on a Mac - my head hurts! ;^)

I assume I'll need 4GB RAM, and I probably should assume I won't be
running any other apps when I fire this thing up. Any other issues I need
to worry about?

Thanks . . .

Mugwumper

[Viro]

Originally Posted by Mugwumper

Thank you for your firm belief that either will allow ActiveX controls to
work.

There is no reason why ActiveX will not work. ActiveX is a very different technology to DirectX, which has had problems working in an emulated environment. ActiveX is just a way of writing software components in a programming language neutral manner and it is an integral part of Windows. If you can't run ActiveX, you can't run Windows. So if any environment is successfully running Windows, it is also capable of running ActiveX controls.

It sounds as if you're going to need to virtualize a copy of Windows to run IE, and then connect to your work server thorough IE? That's not a very demanding requirement and you should be easily able to do that in Fusion. Any new Mac with 2 GB RAM will do the job. Of course, having 4 GB RAM doesn't hurt