Parallels Desktop for Mac Release Candidate 3
The Parallels team today issued Release Candidate 3 of Parallels Desktop, their virtualization software that we've mentioned once or twice. While their announcement blog post only touts two major new features (the ability to seamlessly upgrade a WinXP VM to Vista & a more secure file sharing process between OSes), the beta testing page has quite a bit more to say. A lot of features have been enhanced in RC3, such as better Boot Camp support, ever-enhanced USB support and a new Transporter bundle, but one hidden gem is of particular interest: Parallels Desktop is now ready for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. To be clear: this doesn't mean you can virtualize Leopard in Parallels Desktop - you can run Parallels Desktop on a Leopard machine.Head on over to the beta page for all the details and to grab a copy of the new release.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
tc said 12:06AM on 2-16-2007
3d graphics supprt?????? When!
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i dont know the time said 12:27AM on 2-16-2007
tomorrow.
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John Fredrickson said 4:20AM on 2-16-2007
Hehe, as if somebody would want to run Leopard in Parallels on Tiger :)
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thirdprophet said 6:00AM on 2-16-2007
I'd been putting off keeping up with my Release Candidates on Parallels, but having seen this post late at night with nothing better left to do (slow day and a slow night, which I'm thankful for, really), I decided to go ahead and give RC3 a spin.
I don't know if the changes between RC2 and RC3 are so noticeable, but I can tell you that the gap between RC1 and RC3 are _tremendous_. First of all, it runs a whole load smoother on my machine (Macbook) and integrates like a dream with Mac OS X. The previous versions of Parallels that I ran bogged down my Mac so badly that I usually opted to boot into WinXP (through BootCamp) to get full-speed access to the functions I needed.
Speaking of which... BootCamp partition integration. I was wondering why it wasn't there, and now it is; and it works like a charm. It's beautiful, it's simple, I don't have to keep two installations of Windows XP on my machine taking up space, I don't have to install software again and again on different partitions to do what I need to do. Coherence mode is just stunning and possibly now the most useful thing there is to have. I can literally compare webpages in pretty much all the browsers I need to test on, amongst many other things.
In short... I continue to be more than satisfied with the money I spent, everything works as perfect as I could wish it to. In the words of the late great Buddha, 'zomg its teh best lolol'.
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Michael Rose said 10:21AM on 2-16-2007
Thanks for the feedback 3rdProphet!
3D acceleration for Parallels is projected for next major release, not this current round of changes.
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Graham Fluet said 1:57PM on 2-16-2007
VMware has 3D acceleration, not sure about anything else.
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lM ll lL lL S said 5:48PM on 2-16-2007
OSX 10.5 Ready? do they know something we don't? Do they have secret copies of the new OS?? Do they know secret features?? ....
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Word Diggity said 6:43PM on 2-16-2007
BootCamp support? So I can just install Windows in a BC partition and then use it with Parallels so I don't have to boot into Windows when I want to, say, rip a CD with EAC? This in combination with the Convergence feature would make me a happy camper.
And this is the point where I learn it's been able to do this for a while. :)
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