Parallels Desktop 3.0

Forget the previous post about setting Mac OS to read NTFS with the little plugin I talked about earlier. THE tool to run multiple operating system is besides obviously bootcamp, (comes with MacOS) is virtual machine software like PARALLELS or VMware Fusion.

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Ive been working with Parallels now for a week running my XP installation done with bootcamp, and i am a very happy chap now.

Besides the easy way of grabbing and altering files on the NTFS partition, I can run now all my windows applications inside MacOS and visa versa in XP. It even has some support for OpenGL and DirectX to run a small selection of games through the Virtual machine (no LFS *Sigh*). My first revelation was working in MacOS in Photoshop and having my Winamp (i hate iTunes) streaming my fav tunes through Parallels as an application running in my "dock" (task bar). Next was the impressive switching from windowed view to full screen XP, bit like turning a cube (like switching users in MacOS).

You can run the apps in a VM window or set the apps to run coherence (as they belong to MacOS), and it has great support for USB devices, like external HD's and camera's etc.
It hasnt installed my build in webcam actually, missed that one doing skype through parallels, but that can run in MacOS self anyway.

Besides XP you can run many other operating systems like Linux distri's or Vista etc on multiple Virtual Machines.

Going to try VMware Fusion also, they say it has a lot more grunt (runs faster) then Parallels.. lets see about that.

View Parallels demo:



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