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Dec 06highly reccommended: Parallels Desktop build 3036
Having converted to mac just 4 years ago, after 11 years as a windows user, I’ve always been skeptic on matters of emulation/virtualization (I’m talking macs, here).
My past experiences with PPC and G5 using emulation layers such as MicroSoft Virtual PC never gave much satisfaction.
Limited performance was the first issue.
You can’t really use an application when the surrounding OS is so slow.
The main reason that led me to buy an Intel based mac was the possibility to finally use virtualization on macs, which would have brought a considering performance increase to the whole sometimes necessary Windows XP experience under Mac Os X.
First download on the newly bought MacBook was Parallels desktop, which was still at an early stage, but anyway widely used already.
I’ve been installing my fresh version of XP…
I bought one for the purpose… and I feel guilty.
Anyway, the main purpose of having this double Os setup, was not to carry 2 machines with me on every business trip.
My last trip to Moscow had me going around with 2 laptops in my backpack.
I cannot describe my frustration when I found out that performance was less than poor when using the applications I needed:
- Flash
- Director
- mProjector
This pushed me to install BootCamp, and finally I had a reasonable performance and could produce the mProjector builds for my projects while I was on the way, with the tiny little inconvenient of having to reboot every time.
Where did this lead?
To simply start carrying around another Windows machine when I was on travel.
DOUBLE BACKPACK WEIGHT
DOUBLE FRUSTRATION
Yesterday, while reading through the news I missed in the past few days of work, I found out that there was another update to the Parallel Virtualization software, and decided to give it a shot.
I recovered the previously installed Windows XP image, installed the Parallels Tools to update system components etc, and…
Surprise!
The virtual OS started smoothly, with no slowing down, no glitches, no hick-ups.
I’ve been using it for a while this afternoon, and can’t stop switching back to it just to enjoy the speed of the OS.
I’m really satisfied. I can finally leave to Italy carrying just my macbook and my LittleBig Lacie 160GB.
Life’s so good on macs… so damn good.
The funniest thing?
The flash player 9 is (much) faster under Parallels than it’s natively on Firefox Mac.
UPDATE:
Michael Verdi has an article about this build, and also a screencast displaying a new interesting feature: coherence.
the feature allows you to have masked out windows applications sit next to your mac ones.
sure the APPLE+TAB combination is not allowed yet, but it might be the next step to present single windows applications in the lovely on-screen menu. let’s wait.
I’m personally not too fond of the performance you get when using this feature, but you’ll be able to see from the screencast that it’s quite useful (drag’n'drop features).
a thing I forgot to mention: when you switch (ALT+ENTER) from Parallels to Mac Os, I get a black screen, and have to necessarily hide Parallels (APPLE+H) to see my Os X desktop again.
anyway, this update was for michael verdi’s piece, so here it is