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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.'"
Here's a reprint from my Slashdot journal
Yes, I am joking. Parallels is awesome. The claims of "near native performance" are indeed correct - in my experience. Parallels is what allowed me to finally make the 'switch' because my office is tied heavily to Outlook (and Business Contact Manager and therefore SQL Server).
Parallels works as advertised and is recommended from one slashdotter to another.
Like Baldur's Gate, or Icewind Dale, or Planescape (Any Bioware Infinity Engine Titles really). How do games of this nature run under Parallels? Is DirectX handled acceptably for everything other than 3D acceleration? If so, I'll probably have to speed up my plans to upgrade to an Intel based Mac. I'm a recent switcher, and this is the only thing that's been really hurting me. I use my Gamecube for new games, but to relive older titles it would be awesome if parallels would fill the gap.
www.osx86project.org.
2005 called and wants their joke back.
Seriously though, people have been doing it since the first verrsion of 10.4 x86 was released to developers.
-Ed
So you see what had happened was....
Its potential for creating a dramatic increase in Mac converts should not be overlooked. To the point, I have a particular user (a CFO of a medium-sized manufacturing company) who spends most of her day working Excel spreadsheets, creating documents, emails and using a browser (webforms, webapps, browsing). It was a constant battle to keep her PC clean of virii and spyware. A perfect candidate for switching to a Mac, except for their base accounting system, which will only run in Windows. I got her a new Mac Mini Dlx, installed and configured Parallels with WinXP Pro and she could not be happier. She's running Mac:MS Office for Word, Entourage and Excel, uses Safari/FireFox for browsers (some of her sites won't behave on one or the other) and bounces into the other PCs on the network with COTVNC. And just a note to the non-consultant folks out there... It's always a very good thing to make the CFO happy.
One of the things I like most about Parallels is their "don't let Windows out of the box" approach. Coupled with an (admittedly similar to MS VPC) easy to backup set of files, should anything go wonky with the Windows install, it's a 2 minute job to restore it completely.
I can see this becoming a much more viable alternative to computer-savvy management level types.
Tell that to HP. Their Project Dynamo showed that in many cases running PA-RISC instructions emulated on on PA-RISC machine improved the performance of the program without changing how it was compiled. The emulated version can start to re-order code, change branching behavoir, etc as needed based on how the program is actually running (things like a JIT does on Java or .NET). So there is a place for Native to Native emulation; even if it seems silly.
I installed Parallels on an Intel iMac recently. I created virtual machines with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, and FreeDOS (no reason, just because I can). All of them seem to work fine, except FreeDOS, but then in my experience DOS never worked well on my parents' Tandy either.
I installed Windows XP today and everything seems just fine and peppy. The IT guy who installed it commented that the installation took less time than on some of the Dells he worked with. My favorite part is the backup mechanism - I now have a fresh, no-spyware installation of Windows XP with Matlab, SPSS, and Access all installed. All of my documents will be stored on a Mac hard disk by a shared folder. So I went to the Finder and made a copy of the disk image, and when I want to revert to a fresh image, all I do is delete the working hard drive, and rename "image copy" to "image" and I'm back as good as new. 8)
I have one question for the forum - like many others, I wish there was native hardware acceleration. Wouldn't it be feasible by installing a Windows graphics driver that sends the hardware calls to Parallels, which then uses Mac native OpenGL to do hardware rendering? It doesn't seem that different from ordinary rendering in a window. This could be straightforward for PC OpenGL games, and for the DirectX games, perhaps the calls can be mapped to OpenGL functions. Perhaps with a speed penalty, but it should almost certainly be better than software rendering. You folks who know more about graphics rendering than I do - might this be possible?