Things just got parallel8230 for the Mac Pro

XP

Well, I have to hand it to them, the Parallels team pulled it off. Today they announced that a new release candidate is available that enables Parallels to run on the new Mac Pro. I just installed the update. After a minor warning that a virtual machine already existed (from my previous attempts to run Parallels) the rest of the VM startup went smoothly. I created a 12GB hard disk for the VM and allocated 765MB of RAM.

Install

The next step was to startup the VM (which worked flawlessly this time and to pop my Windows XP Pro CD into the drive. I did get a strange message that my Intel chip supported virtualization, but that I did not have it enabled. I just clicked OK and went about my business as if I knew what that meant. The windows install began right away. I did notice a considerable slowdown of the Mac OS, but I selected the option to optimize the performance of the VM over the Mac OS, so I wasn’t really surprised. I formated the windows partition as FAT. I’m not sure why, but it just seemed like I would want to keep my Mac drive NTFS free, even if it isn’t a “real” drive. The subsequent typical 40min windows install went just as I expected…SLOW. But this is entirely an MS phenomenon, not related to Parallels. When all was said and done, I was extremely happy with the end result. I now can have access to a few random PC programs without having to reboot or startup my home-brew PC.

I did find this message pretty funny. At the time, I was listening to iTunes through the Mac OS. Apparently my entertainment just got better. Who knew.

Funny

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