Parallels Desktop for OS X Reviewed

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put up a great review of the first full release of Parallels' virtualization software for OS X, Parallels Desktop 1.0. From the article: 'Move over emulation, virtualization is in and it's hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It's no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host's processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next. Add to that the fact that it's cheaper than getting a new machine and you have the guaranteed latest craze. Not even the Hula Hoop can stop this one.'"

Comments

Parallels is Great

[Over_and_Done]

I decided to plunk down the money for a new Intel Powerbook because of Parallels, and I have not been dissapointed. I have been using it since thwy released the public beta for it, and it really is a great life saver. Running XP under 1 gig of allocated RAM and I cannot notice a slowdown on the Mac or PC side of the system.

My only pet peeve is the way that the virtual machine mount USB drives only allows 1 OS to have access to the device at a time. So if you are on the Windows side and insert a drive, Mac does not see it, and vice versa. I am not sure if there is a way around that or not. But that really is the only annoyance that prevents me for managing the this seamlessly.

I hate sounding like such a fanboy, but this really is a great piece of software.

I have parallels running

[Clockwurk]

on my Gateway laptop and when combined with OSX, its pretty damn slick. If you plan on playing games or video, you should forget about it and just use Boot Camp, but if you're not using very demanding apps, its a godsend. AutoCAD runs really well, and its nice not having to reboot. If you are contemplating a virtualization app, be aware that you will need memory for both operating systems. 512 is painful, 1 gb can get slow at times, and 2gb is the sweet spot. If you are going to virtualize XP, try SP1 instead of 2. SP2 is a lot slower in virtualization (this was the case when using Virtual PC or VMWare).

In the end, I went with Boot Camp

[Rude Turnip]

I bought a MacBook Pro recently, with the intention of having a single machine for home (OS X) and office (WinXP). I tried out Parallels and there's no doubt that it is a very useful piece of software. Waving my hand over my Macbook (accomplished with Shadowbook + Virtuedesktops), caused my screen to rotate into either Windows XP or OS X at will. The processor speed, because the Core Duo is simply being virtualized, is pretty much full speed. On the other hand, the Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU (with its 256MB of VRAM goodness) cannot be virtualized, so Parallels must emulate an 8meg SVGA card. This makes the graphics of Windows XP seem sluggish. Since I am transitioning from a 4-year old Dell Inspiron that is very peppy and snappy in the GPU department, I refused to tolerate any sluggishness whatsoever in my new ($2K+) computer. I installed Boot Camp yesterday and then installed Windows XP. After you install the Apple-provided drivers for the MacBook (including Radeon drivers), the system runs incredibly smooth under XP. The only special thing I had to do was install Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit (free from MS) to re-map my right Command key as a delete key so that I could use ctl-alt-delete to login to my domain.

If you need to use Windows XP all day as your work OS (as I do), you will find Boot Camp to be the superior solution, if only for the snappiness of the system. I don't need to use OS X at work for any reason, so dual-booting works for me. If you only use a few Windows apps irregularly and will primarily use OS X all day, then Parallels is the way to go. Keep in mind that Boot Camp is free, while Parallels costs $.

Re:In the end, I went with Boot Camp

[mrchaotica]

The real question is: is there any good reason why ctrl-alt-del is used as a combo for logging into 'doze?

Yes! It's because that particular key combination is special: it has unique hooks into the BIOS, event-handling system, etc. As is often the case, Wikipedia is your friend:

On a PC running DOS or a system that runs in real mode, this keystroke combination is recognized by the keyboard handling code in the BIOS and treated as the CPU's NMI signal, which, except for rare exceptions, invokes a soft reboot.

The design of Windows NT is such that, unless security is already compromised in some other way, only the WinLogon process, a trusted system process, can receive notification of this keystroke combination (because it is the first to register the keyboard hook). This keystroke combination is thus a secure attention key.

Re:Parallels - the only time my Mac ever crashed

[davevt5]

To clarify, I mean that I'm "joking" to be annoyed by my Mac crashing when I tried to do so many different things - not that Parallels didn't actually crash my Mac -- it did.

Re:Parallels vs VMWare

[Savage-Rabbit]

Anybody care to summarize the pros and cons of Parallels vs VMWare?

The latter is vaporware on OS.X.

Re:Parallels - the only time my Mac ever crashed

[Kittyflipping]

Your post is from April 26, which means you were using the beta. Since when did we start expecting beta software not to crash your system? I've had a crash or two with the beta, but the release version has been as solid as a rock.

I have used both

[why-is-it]

Anybody tried Parralels for Linux here?

I have. They appear to be fairly equivalent, as far as I can tell. I run SuSE 10 at the office, but I am required to run a few windows-only applcations. I have been using various versions of VMWare for the past 4 years to get around that barrier. I downloaded a trial version of Parallels to see what it was like. I was initially interested because VMWare has been fairly expensive to re-purchase over the years, and Parallels is quite inexpensive by comparison.

Both install via RPM and the install is pretty straightforward. I did not find Parallels difficult to configure, but then I have been using VMWare for some time, and I am familiar with the concepts and what needs to be done. The Parallels interface is quite similar to VMWare's, so if you are familiar with one product, you should be able to use the other. In the past, I learned the hard way that VMWare was a fairly memory-intensive application. Once I added an extra gig of RAM to my workstation everything ran pretty smoothly. I don't know if Parallels runs well with less RAM or not, but I would assume that more memory is always better. I have an Athlon 1700 CPU, and it can run multiple Linux applications and a virtual windows session without tons of paging or lag.

Mind you, I only boot the windows VM once a week or so, and run it for maybe 15-20 minutes at a time. If you wanted to run something more intensive, YMMV. I have not tried to run any games via VMWare either, so I have no idea what that would be like. On the whole, I am pleased to say that both Parallels and VMWare both work really well for me. They offer similar performance and functionality, and both are quite stable applications. The next time VMWare rolls out an upgrade that I have to pay for, I will be switching to Parallels.

As other posters have stated, games are probably the holy grail of windows virtualization. I would like nothing better to have an Intel-based PowerMac with a kick-ass graphics card that could give me all the benefits of owning a Mac, with the added bonus of being able to play my favourite games without rebooting.