There's a whole lot of buzz around the latest Parallels beta release. They have added a new feature called "coherence" which allows OSX and Windows to co-mingle on your desktop. At first, this seems wrong and creepy. But once I appreciated what this will mean for the future, I found peace with Windows on my Mac. Here's the gist, you can drag documents between the Windows and Mac desktops and folders.
I really wanted to bring my DVD's on a recent cross-country flight. I was familiar with backing them up using a PC, but I had never done it on the Mac. I played around with several options and decided that Handbrake is the best solution if you want a file for your iPod or in iTunes while Mac the ripper is the best if you want a dvd image file at full quality.
The latest revision of Parallels Desktop for the Mac is running butter smooth on my Mac Pro with 2GB of RAM. No hangs or crashes. In fact, right now, I'm using Ecto for Mac to write this post while watching DL.TV Episode 100 and installing software updates on Windows XP. To be more specific, the update is for my Sandisk 4GB flash drive. I can't recommend this drive enough.
Parallels has just released RC2 of Desktop for Mac. While the Mac Pro received some love a few weeks back with a beta release, Parallels has put some real quality into this release candidate. Not only is it compatible with Vista and developer builds of Leopard, but there is no longer a RAM restriction. Parallels was only recognizing 3GB before. I have to ask myself though, are there people out there with $2K of RAM in their Mac Pro that do not have a PC sitting under their desk to run windows on?
If you are running the new Parallels RC on a Mac Pro you may have come across this little message when you boot up Windows:
If you read the Parallels support blog about this there’s some help from the user base that indicates you have to put your machine to sleep after reboot in order for this vt-x support to be available in Parallels.
It does work. Before putting the machine to sleep, it took about 1 minuet for Windows XP Pro to startup.
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.
The Parallels website now warns that it is not compatible with the Mac Pro:
“At the moment Parallels Desktop doesn’t run on Mac Pro. We’ll provide an updated version that will function on Mac Pro soon. Click here to sign for Parallels news and stay updated about this issue”.
However, they claim there is a patch in development. This is great news. Let’s hope that they can pull it off. If not, this could be a serious blow to Apple’s quest to capture some of the PC crowd with a mac that can run windows.
It looks like I was not the only Mac Pro owner that was disappointed by the lack of Parallels support. TUAW has an article with a link to the Parallels blog. It also looks like a fix will be out “soon” according to Parallels own blog. Maybe I will finally be able to boot Windows XP Pro on my Mac Pro without a kernel panic. That would be excellent .
