AlexHopmann.com

The new version of Parallels Desktop for the Mac is out. Its funny- they were hyping it up for the last couple of weeks for the 3d support, file copying, and snapshots. I’m sure those will all be pretty useful features, but for me the bootcamp thing was critical- since I switched to running Vista in Bootcamp I haven’t been using Parallels at all so this is the big breakthrough in the new version.

I installed the new version of Parallels and after a couple of days hassle with my activation key, I finally was able to start it up and create a VM pointing to my boot-camp partition. It proceeded to boot Vista- at first it looked like it was hanging, but as best I can tell it was just doing a bunch of processing. Sign in, and it does some device install and reboots again. After it reboots, it again is installing something- this time the Parallels tools. Next lots of “Windows can’t verify the publisher of this driver software” dialogs appeared. This all took surprisingly long- not a serious problem or anything, but it does beg the question of what its doing for 30 minutes or so. The bigger problem was that there was no indication of progress so I couldn’t tell if it was stuck in a loop or something?

In the end it rebooted and it seems like everything is fine. The Coherence feature where each window from Windows opens in an individual Mac window is wild. For some reason the “Use Multiple Displays” feature was not on by default for Coherence. In the end it appears to be working great, although the performance of my Windows apps don’t appear to be in the same ballpark as they were when running natively. For example opening individual emails from Outlook appears noticeably slow.