Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
I tested the Office 2003 and Office 2007 suites, and those programs did run well – more smoothly, in fact, than using either Parallels or Fusion. CrossOver even makes Windows programs look a bit more Mac-like by adding a new title bar complete with the Mac’s candy-coloured control buttons.
Windows apps get it little of the OS X look'n'feel
However, the situation wasn’t quite so rosy when I tried CrossOver Games. I normally test PCs by checking their performance with Far Cry 2, but that falls into the 'doesn't work’ category. My current favourite game is Dragon Age: Origins - it gets a silver medal for compatibility, but I repeatedly got an error message when attempting to install it from disk. I found a fellow sufferer on the Codeweaver support forums who had encountered the same error message, but there's no word of a solution yet.
Another old favourite is Guild Wars, which also gets a silver rating. This installed easily and was quite playable on a MacBook, although the frame rate under CrossOver was only about half of what we got when running the same game under Boot Camp.
Verdict
To be fair, getting any Windows programs running on a Mac without having to install Windows is an impressive technical feat, and Codeweavers has done a good job of giving the Unix-oriented Wine a user-friendly graphical interface. I can’t deny that CrossOver works very well with a limited range of general productivity programs. However, it needs to provide much greater compatibility with the full range of Windows software before it can really be a reliable alternative to Boot Camp, Parallels or Fusion. ®
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
Codeweavers CrossOver Mac
COMMENTS
Not good enough to recommend
The apps that Crossover runs well enough to use on a day to day basis tend to be apps where there is a viable Mac or Linux alternative already available, and that tends to be a better option than running the Windows version in Crossover.
For example you can run older versions of Office except for Access, which doesn't work that well. Access is the only reason you would want to run the Windows version of Office rather than the Mac version or something like OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice.
And for the freetards...
...there's always Winebottler :-)
http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/
Works very well for running the occasional Windows app (especially if you you don't need the full power of VMware Fusion or Parallels).
This software would be great if....
it would run Visio properly. It's the only reason I have for keeping a machine with Windows on.
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