Macworld reviews Parallels, tests other OSs

The fine folks at Parallels told me that they do plan to allow booting off the Bootcamp volume as an option in the future. That would be just killer. I'd like to point out that that these guys have really improved their product, too, with four releases since it was launched. Way to go, Parallels!

I like parallels, but I would LOVE it if I could get Visual Studio 2005 to install on it, instead I get a error during the installastion of the second disk, then when I go searching for the .txt file it's requestion I can see it but can't read it in parallels windows xp sp2, yet in OSX I can read this same .txt file and it just says "this file is a placeholder" or something along those lines. Any suggestion or other's having this same problem? I can't seem to find a fix in Parallels Support Forums. :(

Looks very promising. Hopefully they keep up the hardwork. This would be good for that one app that still requries windows without having to dual boot.

About the auto install. after about 10 minutes of using windows (not during the installation) VPC would "notice" you are running windows and prompt you if you would like to install VPC additions. I think that's what the reviewer was looking for.

Bootcamp and this are completely separate. Parallels creates a file on your OSX disk that is in effect the hard drive that the VM runs on. As far as security goes, I just turned off the network on the VM, since the programs I need to use don't use the internet anyway.

Answer to comment #3

You use Boot Camp completely separately. As far as I know, there is no way to use the Parallels VM using Boot Camp.

Also - I can attest that Parallels is fast. Faster than any other Virtualization I've used (VMWare, Virtual PC, QEMU, etc) on Mac or Windows.

The article touched on this, but I didn't see a hard answer.

Using Boot Camp, can you boot from your VM version of Windows. Or do you have to run the Boot Camp version seprately.

dalvin200,

If you run Windows as a VM then, yes, *Windows* will be susceptible to all the viruses/attacks. However, running Windows as a VM does not compromise OSX in any way.

David,
The Parallels tools are included with the applications installation. If you meant that some people would like the tools automatically installed when someone installs Windows as a VM I think that would be difficult since the "tools" are just custom drivers for XP and you need to have your VM up and running before installing new drivers. (I guess Parallels could have functionality to install the drivers during the 'Press F6 to install additional drivers' portion of the Windows install but that seems rather unnecessary)

if you run windows as VM, does that mean you are still pronse to all the viruses/attacks etc...?