Make my OneNote dreams come true...

May 7, 2008 9:42 PM

Will VMWare Fusion allow me to run Microsoft OneNote smoothly?

I have been wanting to trash my windows based Dell Dullspiron laptop for some time and get a Mac Powerbook. However, I love Microsoft's OneNote and it has kept me tethered to Windows (and yes I've looked at the Mac OneNote substitutes and they aren't what I want). I was complaining about this to a friend who mentioned that I can have the best of both worlds by running OneNote with VMware Fusion. From looking at the VMware web site and a few youtube videos of it in action, I must say it seems to fit the bill.

However, I would love to get some feedback from Mac users on OneNote in VMware. How is the stability? Will it significantly slow down my machine (I typically have excel, onenote, firefox, and a pdf reader open at any given time)? Any other things I ought to be wary of?

posted by boubelium to technology (6 comments total)

I don't have OneNote 2007 handy, and have only had my Mac Pro a couple of weeks. That said, Fusion runs pretty much everything I've tried without difficulty, and I haven't seen it crash.
posted by kindall at 10:07 PM on May 7

It'll be fine. If you get a MacBook Pro, you'll have plenty of power to run it. Also, VMWare Fusion has a feature called "Unity" which allows you to sort-off hide away all the Windows environment except for the applications so it would see like OneNote was just another Mac app in the dock.

Example: http://www.richardallan.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/iPlayerMac.jpg

I personally don't run OneNote in my VMWare setup, but I have used it and it's not a resource intensive app. so should run just fine. Stability is not a concern, it will run as well as it would in a Windows notebook. The only thing I would recommend is to get a lot of RAM in it. I would say 3GB is the sweet spot but 4GB can't hurt (since you are running two operating systems no matter how you look at it). You can purchase 4GB of RAM from Newegg for about $75 and it's a super-simple upgrade you can do yourself. Don't purchase the RAM from Apple, their prices are ridiculous.
posted by cgomez at 10:57 PM on May 7

Yeah, I've found both VMWare and Parallels to be about as stable as a 'real' Windows machine, but you will need more RAM and I suppose it may affect battery life. Install XP with no frills (might be worth reading up on which services you can disable) and experiment with how much memory it needs allocated to run comfortably.
posted by malevolent at 12:00 AM on May 8

I'm a diehard OneNote fan too, and while I agree that it doesn't have a worthy match on OS X yet, a lot of applications come close in power but without a lot of annoyances and immaturity of OneNote. I've very recently wasted three hours migrating half of my OneNote notebooks to Yojimbo, and four more hours moving the rest to Circus Ponies Notebook, and though both of them are missing a lot of features I used to take for granted, they feel native and at the end of the day they get the job done. Just my two cents.
posted by semi at 7:37 AM on May 8

cgomez - Your RAM point is very good advice. I'm afraid I can't afford a MacBook Pro, so normal MacBook will have to do. But I will definitely grab a handful of RAM from Newegg.

semi - The software you mention would probably work out for me, however, I keep my OneNote notebooks on a thumbdrive in order to use it with on campus windows computers. That's why I'm looking for a cross-platform solution... plus I have all my thesis research in OneNote and the thought of transferring it over is just too much.
posted by boubelium at 10:18 AM on May 8

Seconding getting more RAM. I run Windows in parallel occasionally on my Macbook Pro with 2 gigs of RAM and it makes everything significantly slower. My boyfriend has the exact same machine with 4 gigs and never has any problems running Windows in parallel.
posted by peacheater at 11:58 AM on May 8