VMWare Fusion 3 was just released today. I was hesitant to upgrade at first because I didn’t know there was upgrade pricing. As soon as I saw I could upgrade for $39.99 I did.

After playing around with it for a while I don’t see many new features that I’ll actually use. I have been running Windows 7 for a few months now without the Aero interface and I think I prefer it that way. I use Windows 7 on my Mac as a Visual Studio development environment so I want to keep it fast. Enabling Aero seems to have slowed everything down. Windows seems less snappy than it was.

I also think that enabling Aero makes the CPU and graphics processor work harder than before. When I start up 7 I can hear the fans in the MacBook Pro kick on to full blast and stay on for about 10 minutes until the laptop finally cools down.

The one feature I will be looking forward to are the automatic updates. Hopefully no more uninstalling the entire app and then re-installing for every upgrade. They also integrated a virtual machine library like they’ve had on their site for a while which makes it easy to try and utilize open source and trial software that has been bundled as a VM.

I’m glad I upgraded to the newest version but I don’t think I’ll take advantage of any new features. I’m sure there are a lot of performance enhancements and bug fixes in the background that will make this a valuable purchase but I didn’t have many issues with v2.