I hate to say this, but I am really disappointed with the Win4Lin Pro product. For those of you who don’t know what this is… it’s software that allows you to run windows programs in Linux. Well, to be fair, it’s more than that. Being that it’s built on top of qemu, it’s actually a full-blown PC emulator which happens to run Windows 2000 and Windows XP, etc.

The reasons I’m disappointed with this new product from Win4Lin are as follows:

• It’s REALLY slow. REEEEEALLY slow. Vmware is about 20 times faster.
• I have been a Win4Lin customer for years, and their old Win9X emulator was REALLY, REALLY fast. Like, twice as fast as Vmware. I was really expecting to see amazing speed with WinXP with Win4Lin 1.1 Pro, and maybe that’s my fault for having expectations to begin with, but I did, and they were not close to being met.
• The price point of this product is over the $100 mark. This is significantly more expensive than Win4Lin was when I was a paying customer. And being that performance is absolutely horrible, I definitely cannot see myself paying $120 for this. And that saddens me, because quite honestly, I can’t see anybody paying $120 for this. And that saddens me because Win4Lin used to be the best windows-on-linux software available. =:/

So, all in all, I’m frustrated for having spent a LARGE amount of time waiting for my laptop to not be 100% CPU-constrained by Win4Lin as it installed WinXP and subsequently ran it, at 486dx4-100 speed. =:/

Very sad. Win4Lin, I wish you the best of luck. I really do. But you’ll have to figure out how to get your VM performance to be better than VMware’s to be successful, I honestly believe, and that’s going to be a really tough job. =:/