The Hickensian
72 comments
I want to hear from Parallels users
Is anyone out there using Parallels on either a MacBook or MacBook Pro? Hard disk and RAM needs aside, do you find that it works as a testing environment for Windows and Linux? I’ve been burnt by previous experiences with sluggard Virtual PC, so for the last 3 years I’ve been using a PC Laptop. It was this dual-computer usage that led Leigh to call me “Web Design’s Rick Wakeman”.
However, the sheer convenience and electrical economy of one-machine-to-do-everything sounds too good to be true. Is it? Please leave me your thoughts and experiences! Thanks!
Update Thanks follks, the message came through loud and clear. An MacBook Pro is now on its way! :D
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Mark Boulton said 1057 days ago:
I’ve been using Parallels on an Intel iMac and it’s pretty good. In fact, no, it’s superb when you compare it with Virtual PC. There really is no comparison speed wise – Parallels is incredibly quick. Combine that with VirtueDesktops and you have a great development platform.
Andrew Sutherland said 1057 days ago:
I don’t have it myself, but I’ve been been mad envious of coworkers who are using it. I’ve gotten the demo and it’s fantastic. At work everyone has two screens, so they’ve got one screen for OS X and one screen for Win. And they can just drag the mouse in between. So it’s perfect for testing in IE. They told me Win is faster on their MacBooks running parallels than it is on their home PCs.
I can’t wait to get an intel mac just to use this feature. It’s definitely been every web developer’s dream. I’ve been using Virtual PC on my G5 and it is unusably slow. Can’t wait to upgrade..
Carsten Rose Lundberg said 1057 days ago:
Been using it for IE testing since the first public beta. It works as advertised and is a quantum leap forward compared to Virtual PC. Does take up ressources so I only have it running when I need it.
Olof Lönnroth said 1057 days ago:
I use Parallels on my MacBook, and it works great. It’s fast, you can limit the amount of RAM it eats, everything works as if on a real windows machine, and everything is quite snappy and responsive after installing the Parallel Tools in Windows.
Since I don’t use Windows for anything other than testing websites in various browsers, I think Parallels works great. I don’t know about how it works with heavier tasks though.
David Barrett said 1057 days ago:
It’s very good, I find… but you definitely want to have 2 gigs if you want to run that and Photoshop and the same time.
Rosetta Photoshop, Parallels, 40+ tabs in Camino, Mail, Newsfire, iTunes + Textmate = PAIN with 1 gig.
Jon Hicks said 1057 days ago:
Olof – I’m not going to be doing any heavy gaming or 3D rendering work on it, but there may be need to run a Disney Princess CD-ROM though!
David Appleyard said 1057 days ago:
I use Parallel on a daily basis, and have found it to be fantastic. It’s in a different league to Virtual PC and is just so convenient. My setup allows me to simply hit ‘alt’ and the screen box-transitions to Windows seamlessly. It even automatically adjusts the screen resolution etc.
I’ve been using it to test a new website project extensively in IE for several months, and I’d recommend it thoroughly. I’ve got 1.25gb RAM and it’s snappy – only lags with a lot of Mac programs open as well.
That’s my two cents!
Philby said 1057 days ago:
I don’t have a MBP yet myself (waiting for Merom), but after some prodding and handing over of a WinXP installer CD, my work colleague now has it running on his MBP (2GB RAM I think), and is absolutely thrilled. We threw our 2 PCs into the trash last week :-)
The only two small caveats are: the cursor does seem to lag a little bit in the parallel’d Windoze environment, and he’s had some weird stuff going on with his wireless and/or ethernet connection—strange TCP-IP settings he tells me.
Gordon Mackay said 1057 days ago:
I only use it for testing sites, and for that purpose it seems to work perfectly.
I have only 1 gig of RAM, and with only 256Mb allocated to Parallels I can run all common browsers for Windows within Parallels and still work in OS X comfortably with Mail, iTunes, Fireworks and sKEdit open.
Stuart Colville said 1057 days ago:
I’m using parallels on a MacBookPro and so far I think it’s brilliant and has far exceeded my expectations. I’m using parallels with both windows and ubuntu VMs and it works perfectly well for site testing. I’m really appreciating not needing a second windows machine to test sites on.
Things to point out. Using windows with an apple keyboard is a bit annoying at first but it is possible to remap the command key to ctrl so that at least copy and pasting is possible in the way that you are used to. Also if you set win/linux to use an american keyboard layout you will find that this matches much better to the apple keyboard layout.
The only things I don’t like about parallels is the lack of parallels tools for linux and that it seems to be difficult to increase the resolution of the ubuntu install I’m using. So far editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding a custom resolution to the ubuntu VM settings doesn’t seem to cut it, but I’m sure it is possible. Other than that I would say that for site testing, Parallels is the ideal solution.
Joshua Delsman said 1057 days ago:
There is definitely no comparison to Virtual PC. Also, you will probably find that using Windows XP under Boot Camp is quicker.
However, I like to test with IE6 (not IE7, yet) so Windows 2000 does the job just fine. Parallels runs quickly, and easily — allowing me to get back to my Mac as fast as I can ;-)
Chris G said 1057 days ago:
Parallels is an amazing piece of software. It actually runs Windows faster then my PC laptop. No issues with it at all and all I use it for is testing (or that rouge web site that requires IE).
Jesper said 1057 days ago:
Great for everything but games, and they’ll be building in 3D acceleration shortly. You’ll want to max out on RAM (2GB), which you’ll want to purchase it from outside of Apple if you have any sympathy for your wallet.
The long and short of it is: with sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.
Eystein said 1057 days ago:
Using it strictly for testing sites in IE. It’s a blessing having everything on one computer.
Never tried any heavier stuff on it. From what I understand it won’t be able to play graphic intensive games, so I guess it won’t run a program like Photoshop very well either.
Simon Clayson said 1057 days ago:
I’ve set it up for someone on a Macbook with 2GB RAM, and it impressed me greatly. I want an Intel mac now.
elsmoko said 1057 days ago:
Yep, it works amazingly well. I use it for testing web sites only and I have a Macbook Pro with 2 gig of ram. It flies along quite happily.
Jan Brašna said 1057 days ago:
I have an additional qustion – how’s it with the old gamma issue? Does the gamma look like on W32 box or it leans to the OSX gamma when it’s run inside it? Additionally – does the W32 display w/ the correct gamma setting when used via BootCamp? And is that different from the Parallels version?
Paul said 1057 days ago:
You can’t go wrong with Parallels Jon. I used to use Virtual PC on my G5, and it was a horible experience – soooooo slow. Parallels (and my MacBook Pro) can get slow if I have it and a number of apps open all at once (espeically Rosetta apps which I think are the real culprit for the slowdown).
If you move over to using Parallels for your testing environment, you won’t be disappointed. I haven’t installed a Linux OS thou – do you test in Linux too? That’s dedication to the cause!
Jon Hicks said 1057 days ago:
I don’t at the moment, but I do want to (for icons not sites!)
Jeroen Coumans said 1057 days ago:
I’m also considering using Parallels. I wonder how they’ve solved networking though? I do a lot of local development and run lighttpd on localhost. This makes it very difficult to use in VirtualPC; I just haven’t been able to configure it to listen to the correct address. Is this any easier with Parallel?
Brad said 1057 days ago:
I’ve had a pretty good experience with Parallels but I’m totally excited about the new VMware beta for OS X coming up. Parallels is nice and all but there’s just so much experience in VMware, and I’m making the (dangerous?) assumption that they’ll have better support for Vista since they emulate ACPI, whereas Parallels can’t run Vista now but plans to in the future.
As for comparisons to VPC, it’s not that VirtualPC is inferior, per se, but that it has to actually emulate the x86 instruction set on PPC, whereas Parallels and VMware just pass the instructions through, hence a huge performance difference.
Larry Myers said 1057 days ago:
Jon,
I use Parallels for browser testing in both Linux and Windows on my MacBook Pro and love it. Even wrote a how-to article for the setup:
Using Parallels to Browser Test
Chris McLeod said 1057 days ago:
Parallels is amazing. I’ve used Virtual Machine software on a range of systems over the years and Parallels is by far the easiest to setup and the best performing.
I have OS X, XP Home and Ubuntu on my MacBook (2GHz, 1GB RAM, 100GB HDD). When I switch to Ubuntu in fullscreen mode, I could honestly forget it’s a virtual machine.
OS X can slow down a little (or a lot, depending on VM memory/caching config), but the new beta version apparently improves this a lot. I’ve yet to play with the new cache settings myself, so I can’t give a definitive answer here. I can’t say it’s bothered me too much when it has slowed down – I’ve generally only been wanting to command-tab to another app, type a few things, tab to a browser and refresh the page.
The best thing about Parallels is the networking – I have Apache setup for local development testing. For each VM I’ve setup, Parallels has auto configured the networking support of the VM so the guest OS “just works” – meaning it can access my dev setup no bother.
To sum up: my MacBook + Parallels is the all-in-one-box web development machine I’ve been waiting for this last 10 years :-)
Kevin Teljeur said 1057 days ago:
Oops, somehow shot my comment too early there. I think. Anyhow, I have a MacBook Pro, 2gb RAM, 100 gb HD, etc etc; I work all day in Windows in Parallels (we’re talking up to 12 hours a day) doing web development, using more or less a cloned work set-up and I can tell you that it’s faster than my colleague’s PCs by a good margin. That fast. Really very damn fast. Boots up fast too. It’s actually good enough to be a primary work environment if you don’t need 3D or USB 2 support, it behaves as you’d expect a PC to.
Parallels is great because I still flip back to the Mac OS once in a while to see how my other processes are doing, and I can copy a drive image and test other software without mangling my work set-up. So, like having multiple PCs, managed by the stable Mac OS, and you can access Apache on the Mac and IIS on Windows, they can access each other with named hosts. and share folders, etc, have your own on-board network, all you need for web dev work
Downsides are that Parallels isn’t 100% stable. It does lock up occasionally for no good reason which is very irritating, and even on the new beta (which is faster still than the 1.0 release) the USB/device support is lacking. It can eat your processor cycles for no readily discernable reason. Also read information about RAM carefully before you throw RAM at the solution, since there is a limit to how much does any good. I’d still recommend it completely, it’s damn good.
Robert Scriva said 1057 days ago:
I bought Parallels a while back when it was $49 (is it still $49?). The latest beta seems to be loads better than the initial release. I’m on an Intel basd Mini with 1gig of RAM using Win2K and could care less about gaming (that’s why i have a 360).
I’ve had issues with support, that is, no response to my emails. I had contacted them about some keyboard mapping issues. And that some of the PC keys couldn’t be mapped across. The new version released this week fixed all the swap file issues. OSX would grind to a halt as it allocated swap space.
I am signed up for the VMware beta. I was a VMware user on windows and well, they make good stuff ;) Perhaps hold out for that? Or just get the free beta of Parallels and try it out.
You could also visit the parallels forums to find out what people are having issues with….
James Darling said 1057 days ago:
Doesn’t seem like I need to, but I’ll throw may praise down here as well.
Not only have they done it first, they’ve done it perfectly. They even have tools set up to make sure the mouse is smooth and that you can drag in and out of the windows window (black mouse, white mouse, black mouse, with mouse).
I’m running an early MBP with 1.5 Gig, and it runs fine. but are you sure you want IE on your mac, it’s depressing
Matt Carey said 1057 days ago:
Chalk up another happy Parallels user! Such a difference compared to VirtualPC :)
John Oxton said 1057 days ago:
I have Parllels running Windows XP twice, one for IE6 one for IE7 and a copy of Ubuntu Linux for good measure. Combined with Virtue Desktops I have found it a completley transparent experience. It is NOTHING like Virtual PC, it works in a completley different way and it is as fast as you will ever need for testing purposes.
All I will say, though, is get a big hard drive my 70gb HD is nearly full due to so many OSs!
Thomas Mango said 1057 days ago:
I use my personal MacBook Pro at work, where I am a software engineer at a small (about 100 employees) company. Because our department is so small, I often must manage some things in our domain when my co-workers are busy. I also have to manage our application servers. I must be able to log into a Windows domain every day to do these things, and Parallels lets me do that.
I also work with large PostgreSQL databases all day long. The PostgreSQL database management application landscape sucks pretty hard for OS X (that’s why I am developing PGnJ – shameless plug), but my group owns licenses to EMS PostgreSQL manager, which is really excellent. If I need that application or I need pgAdmin to actually work, I fire up Parallels.
No matter when I use Parallels, it works like a charm. It’s fast as hell and it gets the job done. It also starts windows in about 10 seconds, so I don’t even keep it open all the time. Whenever I need it I just launch it to perform that task (even if it’s just checking to see if some code I just wrote works in IE – it usually doesn’t).
I should probably also mention that I have the 2GHz Core Due with 2GB of ram.
Joshua said 1057 days ago:
It is the perfect solution yes.
It’s not too good to be true… cause it is true.
Set it up full screen with Vurtue (virtual desktops) and with the hit of a button, you’re in XP, hit key again and you’re back… it’s amazing. You can even set it to your motion sensor, so you give your MBP a tap and wam, you’re in windows…. It’s sick.
Patrick Haney said 1057 days ago:
I’ve had Parallels for quite some time now and have been using it for IE6 testing, but I find it really useful to run Windows applications quickly and easily. I’m using it on a MacBook Pro which I recently upgraded to 2GB of RAM, which helped a lot. You can use 1GB of RAM just fine, but I found that with more than a few applications open and Parallels running, things started to slow down considerably.
Steven Marshall said 1057 days ago:
For those of you lucky enough to already have an Intel Mac (I’m looking to replace my PowerMac with a Mac Pro in the next few months, and my iBook with a MacBook… somewhen), you might find my post on Windows Keyboard layouts useful.
In short, I’ve produced custom Windows XP keyboard layouts to allow Mac OS-style layouts to be used in Windows, so you can use Ctrl-Alt where you’d use Opt on the Mac.
Joe said 1057 days ago:
Allow me to join the chorus and say, yes Parallels really does work well for testing on IE. My only warning would be to max out on RAM. Parallels plus Rosetta running Photoshop and Illustrator turns my quick MacBook Pro sluggish, even with 2 gigs of RAM.
Otherwise, no complaints.
neil said 1057 days ago:
It works really, really well. Highly recommended.
Adrian D said 1057 days ago:
It’s not perfect, but I’m loving it. I have a Macbook with 1GB of RAM and using Parallels purely for IE testing. It works really well, although OS X can become a little bogged down when running photoshop at the same time. Luckily for me I mainly work out of a text editor, so this isn’t a huge concern for me, but I’m hoping it becomes less of an issue when Adobe release it as universal binary. Otherwise, it is definitely a liberating experience being able to switch into IE with only a few taps of the fingers (or taps of the screen in some people’s cases :)
You should check out the Ars Technica review if you haven’t already. It’s quite detailed.
Jon Hicks said 1057 days ago:
I should perhaps make the point that I don’t have an intel mac, which is why I’m asking for opinions! If the reactions were favourable though I am seriously thinking about moving to a MacBook or MacBook Pro.
The reactions were more than favourable! I’m doing it!
Thanks everyone for taking the time to leave your experiences, its coming through loud and clear!
Isaac Bythewood said 1057 days ago:
I have a standard Mac Book Pro 2.16 gig 1gig of ram $2500 running parallels. I have run 2 distros of linux fedora, gentoo… 1 bsd, freebsd… and windows xp no problems with any of them. I set them to use mostly just 256mb of ram unless i really do need more which is rare for a virtual os and have experienced hardly any speed problems on either when using them at the same time… heck i have parallels running gentoo half the time hidden and I never notice it so it really is very good for testing purposes.
Anton said 1057 days ago:
Best thing I ever did for my MacBook Pro was install both Parallels with Virtue Desktops – no regrets, works like a champ for testing in both Linux and XP.
Choco said 1057 days ago:
For me it’s better to have two computers. PC and Macbook. And I don’t have to test anything :)
M said 1057 days ago:
I’ve been running Parallels on my Intel MacBook Pro (1.83hz, 1Gb RAM) for ages. It runs two XP installations (IE6 and 7) and works pretty damn well. You do need to install the Parallels Tools to get it pretty seamless with OSX though.
Oh yes, and thanks for the link to VirtueDesktops the other day. How the fudge did I miss that, it’s fudging brilliant!
jared said 1057 days ago:
I wonder how VMWare will run on intel macs. I know on PC’s it is the fastest and most stable Virtual Machine program, so it will be interesting to see how it compares to Parallels!
Jacob Reiff said 1057 days ago:
I connect to a Intel Mac Mini via Apple Remote Desktop from a PowerBook, and am running Parallels on the Mini to test sites in XP, Win2K and Ubuntu. Quite a bit faster than Virtual PC, even running through my wireless network. The mouse is a bit laggy in Linux, but Parallel Tools works really well to keep Windows bearable. (I mean, it is Windows after all…)
Jason Reljac said 1057 days ago:
I’ve been using Paralles since the beta arrived and I must say, I love it. I had used VPC on my old PB and, while it did work, it was frustratingly slow.
With Parallels, things run right and feel quite zippy. I also have yet to encounter any problems installing any applications onto the Parallels image. I had issues with several applications with VPC for some reason.
I will say that the Parallels shared folders do not work for me at all. They are painfully slow, and ocassionally cause Windows errors or a flat out crash. (Shared folders in VPC always worked…slow, but it worked)
I mainly use it for web testing, but I also do some limited VS.NET/SQL development on it with no problems.
Dan Ridley said 1057 days ago:
On a MacBook with 2 GB, it’s only a little less responsive than my Athlon 64 3000+. It’s good enough that I retired Windows on the Athlon (turning it into a file server with Solaris/ZFS).
I use it for Web testing, for generating crossword puzzles with Crossword Weaver (hundreds at a time for books I assemble), and for using ScanSoft PDF Creator (because I’ve come to rely on its quirks for making PDFs from Word that play nice with InDesign).
It also runs Bookworm, Strange Adventure in Infinite Space, and Spellagories just fine, though 3D games would doubtless choke it.
It’s really nice to have IE6 installed on one image and IE7 on another, and have them both running simultaneously.
My main complaint thus far is that I can’t get Windows to see both my monitors; so I can put Windows fullscreen on one monitor or the other, but I can’t get one Windows session to go dual-screen.
Also Parallels will not run with a disk file that’s stored on a file server, which is unfortunate. Almost all my storage is on other machines; I had to move an external drive off my Mini and hook it up to the ‘Book instead.
Wolfgang Bartelme said 1056 days ago:
As already mentioned – Parallels is not comparable to Virtual PC speed wise. I use it for testing web sites on IE and it saves me a lot of time. However be sure to get a MacBook with 2GB of RAM – even though it works with 1GB, Parallels keeps on swapping and swapping.
Marco said 1056 days ago:
I like Parallels a lot actually. I’ve been using it for a couple of months already, mainly for testing websites in IE. For this purpose it functions absolutely great.
Environment: MacBook Pro 2Ghz with 2.5GB RAM.
I however do have some gripes:
First of all it’s a real resource hog. Much more than like VMWare on Linux it can sometimes consume almost all available CPU time for half a minute or more. This is especially so when it’s resuming or suspending from / to disk.
Secondly, and this is what I actually really HATE about it: It seems like it’s hijacking all pheripals I connect to my MBP. For example when connecting my USB cardreader, a digital camera or a phone it doesn’t appear at all in the MacOS X environment. It only appears in the virtual machine running Windows. Same thing with my DVD burner. When Parallels is running, Toast seems to think I don’t even have a burner. The only way for me to get around this is to pause the virtual machine before connecting anything and / or inserting a disc.
It’s definitely tons better than Virtual PC on my dual G5 and it’s absolutely fine for testing sites in IE. It’s however definitely not perfect (yet).
Michael Sica said 1056 days ago:
I use it everyday to run actual applications. OSX was painful with only 1 gig of RAM. Once I upgraded to 2 gigs of RAM, it works great.
Loz Gray said 1056 days ago:
A couple of weeks ago I worked in Parallels all day using illustrator CS because of a compatibility issue (CS 2 vs CS), and it was as if I was using a PC. Parallels is one of the most impressive bits of software I have used, and I would wager it runs Illustrator CS as quickly as the itself emulated Mac version.
Julian Schrader said 1056 days ago:
Parallels definitely rocks. I’ve tested it on a MacBook with 1GB of RAM and not only used the ordinary tools, I could even play a little bit of CounterStrike with it. Speed is great – and impossible to compare with the old sluggy VirtualPC. Even WLAN is no fear since Parallels uses your established Airport connection and simulates a LAN to Windows. Everything works like a charm – well, as far as it is possible if you’re running Windows ;-)
Matt Thomas said 1056 days ago:
This isn’t related to Parallels. I just wanted to say that I saw Rick Wakeman perform about a month ago. He only used a Grand Piano (and a full theatre pipe organ for his encore). He played the crap out of that piano. Easily the best solo concert I’ve ever been to.
Rob Scriva said 1056 days ago:
Do yourself a favour. Get rid of your PPC Macs and go out and grab an Intel based one. I did it as soon as i could get my grubby hands on one. The best decision I ever made. I’ve had a few mates do something similar (they grabbed Macbooks).
You won’t regret the “switch” ;)
Neil said 1056 days ago:
Slightly off topic but does anyone have information on getting Tiger to run virtually on a PC with something like Parallels? Parallels website doesn’t list OS X as a supported “guest” operating system. Is there anything out there more modern than Pear PC?
Kristofer Baxter said 1055 days ago:
Quick note: Parallels doesn’t yet work on the Mac Pro. In fact it causes a system kernel panic!
However, I have nothing but good things to say about its performance on my intel iMac at work. 2GB of RAM and you can leave it open while going about your daily work.
Infact, one of our programmers just picked up a MacBook Pro as his main development machine (and we are a MSSQL house). He runs Parallels constantly to work on database stuff I dont pretend to understand.
josh said 1055 days ago:
Hey Jon, what specs you looking at for your new macbook? Just wondering.
Richard Rutter said 1055 days ago:
Contrary to Kristofer Baxter’s comment, I was shown Parallels running on a Macbook Pro only this morning. The owner of said laptop was, until a few days earlier, a die-hard PC user; now he is one happy bunny as he can run OSX, XP and Linux at the same time, with XP running some software (Flex, Dreamweaver) faster than on his brand new PC laptop. It seems Parallels rocks the big one.
Mark said 1055 days ago:
Parallels Desktop is very good for most things, however I use Windows for a lot of my gaming so at this point it is better for me just to use Boot Camp. For normal use i.e. office, internet etc Parallels is more than zippy enough. I am going to use it to install Ubuntu however.
Dave S. said 1055 days ago:
Just do it.
One word of caution – make your choice of Intel-based Mac well, because whatever you buy will likely end up being your main machine.
Dunstan said 1055 days ago:
I’ve been using it on my (2GHz, 2GB) MacBook, and it’s much, much, much faster than VPC on my Dual 2.3GHz G5 with 2GB of RAM.
I’ve stripped down XP so it runs a little quicker (removed all the themes and so on) and I’m as happy as a bee.
Thoroughly recommended, along with an install of Virture Desktops.
ryan masuga said 1055 days ago:
I have a 15” 2.16 Mac Book Pro with 2GB of RAM and use Parallels for testing. I used to use VirtualPC…and there is just no comparison. For speed and ease of use in testing, Parallels is exactly what I needed.
I’m also using Virtue Desktops. I call one desktop ‘XP’ and usually keep Parallels open there.
These Mac Book Pros are tops!
brian warren said 1055 days ago:
Parallels is fantastic. And it is just getting better and better. I use it on my Macbook pro and on my imac and it runs great. Far better than my dual 2.0 g5 with virtual pc. Just do it. It makes for a fabulous testing environment.
Though I echo the comments about hard disk space. Tons of ram helps too, just so you can leave it open when working.
Dave Jeffery said 1055 days ago:
Parallels is really great, but I found that the only thing that I ever used it for was testing sites in IE6. Parallels + Windows XP can end up being quite expensive when you only want to use it for testing sites in IE6.
CrossOver Mac (it’s currently in the alpha stage of development) suits my needs better, it’s a bit cheaper than Parallels & I don’t need to fork out for a windows licence.
Compatibility with programs is the major problem when compared to Parallels. Feel free to have a read through my brief review if you get the chance.
Drew said 1054 days ago:
I too am running Parallels on a 2GHz/1Gb MacBook Pro. I have two Win98 images (IE5 and IE5.5) and two WinXP images (IE6 and IE7). It’s glorious.
Speed-wise, an interesting statistic is that I can go from cold to booting Windows and having an IE6 window open in around 12 seconds. Windows runs faster on this Mac than I’ve ever seen it.
aBitGone said 1054 days ago:
I’m chuffed to bits with Parallels, happily running XP (and even sometimes Server 2003) on my MacBook Pro – though running it alongside other OS X apps can cause some memory-hunger-pangs. Nothing that won’t be solved by upgrading to 2GB instead of the 1GB I went for. I knew I shouldn’t have been such a cheapskate… ;o)
Mark said 1054 days ago:
John! Do you hate me or was it my quick and poor typing? Parallels is awesome and works great. If you play games however you would be better off with Boot Camp for the time being. Parallels Desktop is really fast with Linux and Win XP and is great for day to day use.
Drew: Why not install the stand alone versions of IE under one install?
http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone
Jon Hicks said 1054 days ago:
- Mark, the problem with standalone versions is that you don’t quite get the full picture. Some elements don’t behave as they should be. By having a separate OS for each you get the true picture.
What was that bit about?
Mark said 1054 days ago:
Valid points on the standalone versions.
Oh I posted something and my end screwed up and it never came through.
Kevin Burg said 1053 days ago:
Parallels was working great for me on an Intel mini for testing sites in IE. After a couple weeks I decided to use boot camp just for the ability to mirror a PC experience as closely as possible. And to use MTV Overdrive to watch after-show clips from my favorite MTV programs, such as The Hills.
Ed Eliot said 1053 days ago:
I use Parallels at work on a 2Ghz/1Gb MacBook Pro with a mixture of Windows XP (IE 6, 7) and Windows 98 (IE 5, 5.5) images. So far it seems to work really well – much faster than Virtual PC, VMWare or any of the other variants I’ve tried in the past. In fact in most cases it runs fast enough that running full screen I’d be hard pushed to tell I was using a virtual machine for normal day to day tasks.
The only time I had a problem was when trying to run more than one virtual machine at once on a mac mini which really didn’t have enough memory.
I thought it might be worth me pointing out that I found it quite hard to go back and make modifications to this blog comment as the blinking text insertion character doen’t seem to show in my browser (Firefox 1.5 Mac OS X) – like the live preview though. ;-)
Mark said 1053 days ago:
Not to spam and a bit off topic but John, Drew I found this and thought you may want to check it out and share.
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/multiIE.html
Basically it adds functionality back to the stand alone IE versions thus saving many of us the space required for multiple windows installs. Thought it may be handy. Of course you probably knew about it lol. And I am not sure yet (until i test it) if it is indeed a solid fix.
BUXjr said 1053 days ago:
I run it on a MacBook (2gHz/2GB) and absolutely LOVE it. I use WinXP-SP2 for Visual Studio as I am an ASP.NET developer and SQL Server Architect. I run Visual Studio 2003, SQL Server, IIS5.0, Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, Microsoft Office XP, Homesite 5.5 and Skype—all with absolutely NO problems whatsoever. In fact, I agree with many posters here; it runs faster and smoother that my Dell Inspiron Laptop.
Get it—you won’t be disappointed. I was shocked. I still smile everytime I fire it up.
Jesse said 1053 days ago:
I have heard that VM Ware will be releasing a public beta of a similar product in next few months. You will have to bet that a company like VM ware will have one heck of a product for a decent price.
I think Parallels is a wicked product but its the first version of a great idea. it might be worth the wait…
John Athayde said 1052 days ago:
I use parallels to test MSIE 6 and 7 (as well as do AutoCAD work) and it works great on my MacBook Pro. My only complaint is the boot time after upgrading the install to service pack 2. It seemed to run MUCH faster with XP out of the box.