New Parallels beta on the street

19: VM Ware has a LONG way to go to compete with Parallels. I'm not sure they will try, seeing as how their product seems to be more oriented towards enterprise-level virtualization, whereas Parallels seems to be developing features suitable for and valuable to desktop users.

I bought a 17" Intel iMac recently for one of my sisters that's still using a Pentium 90 with 32 MB RAM (!). I'm waiting for the 2GB upgrade that I just ordered which was purchased mostly so that she could run XP under Parallels. Though I knew Parallel was working on booting separate partitions I didn't know they were this close. So I thought it would be an either/or proposition for my sister (I wasn't about to install two separate copies of XP on her machine. We're talking about someone that had a computer from the stone ages here. IOW, easily confused. ;) ).

Now to hear about Coherance Mode and Drag n' drop? This new Mac is going to be an awesome experience for her. ;)

CrossOver? Are you kidding? Crossover is useless for the vast majority of applications ever written, as well as for every single new application that needs the .NET runtime. I bought it when they first announced it, but that was out of hope, sheer charity and because I believe the WINE project will be important for future Win32 archeology -- not because CrossOver is a good or even usable piece of software.

The coherence mode is nice, it feels very similar to what can be achieved with SeamlessRDP and rDesktop, but without the limitations of using RDP to achieve integrated windows (such as non-cleartype text and flash performance issues.)

It does have the same trouble with custom skins; leaving a strip of the desktop visible above skins that are more compact than XP's default and not catching the rounded corners. Overall these are small issues and really aesthetic at best.

I haven't tried the Boot Camp partition access yet, but if it runs as good as I hope I might just dump my Parallels disk image and migrate my files over. It'd be great to eliminate redundancy and open up some space on my system.

I hope MS doesn't buy them out like it did VirtualPC.

#12 -- Blah, sorry to not nail that down. It wasn't immediately apparent from the forum thread what the volume format support was for Boot Camp in Parallels, and I was tight on time to get the post up (kindergarten lets out promptly :-).

As it happens, there is a bug in the current rev so that the Boot Camp feature ONLY works with NTFS, not FAT32 (as noted by other commentors).

The link to the Parallels beta forum (where you can download all the goodies) is now in the post.

Re: Coherence mode -- I left this out of the list of updates, but judging by the comments here and at the Parallels forum, it's a big winner. I am interested to see how it compares on speed, compatibility and resource usage with CrossOver Office, since it looks like Parallels is simply making the Win desktop transparent to let you see your Mac apps (requiring the full memory/processor footprint of XP), while CrossOver is running just the minimal 'bottle' Win32 APIs to support the specific app you need.

I'm already in Love with Coherence mode... this is a great update.

Am I only in wishing 3D (or simply accelerated 2D graphics) would have taken priority over Boot Camp partitions?

For me, the whole beauty of a virtual disk environment is that when the Windows install becomes bogged down with entropy, as it INEVITABLY does every half year (or sooner, if you enter .dll hell), you can simply erase the disk and start over with a fresh copy that you backed up when making the initial install.

That's much harder with a physical disk partition (BartPE disk imaging notwithstanding) so it's unlikely I'll ever stop using virtual disk files.

Graphics acceleration on the other hand can't come soon enough.

"...if this supports NTFS..."

If? IF? Um, isn't it your job to figure this stuff out for your readers? How hard could it have been? I mean, if you want to make money off the ad revenue you get from getting people to visit your site, you may want to actually pretend you care about what you're doing...

Here is the link to the forum with all of the details and links to the boot camp assistant and the transporter assistant

http://forums.parallels.com/thread5997.html