Thursday, December 04, 2008

Test driving Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

I was pretty excited about Parallels announcing the new Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac. After the day "Hell froze over," i.e. Macs switching to Intel chips, one thing on many Mac users' minds was running Windows on these beautiful machines. The race was on, and most people had bet on virtualization powerhouse VMWare to come out with the first product.

Parallels, an obscure software firm with ties to Eastern Europe, jumped onto the scene with Parallels Desktop for Mac, beating everyone else to Windows virtualization on a Mac. Its product offered a preferred alternative to Apple's Boot Camp.

I've been using Parallels 3.0 extensively since its release, on a MacBook and MacBook Air loaded with a Windows XP virtual machine (VM). It runs well, but I wouldn't call it fast. With version 4.0, it definitely feels snappier. Coherent Mode is also improved, and a new Modality Mode is added.

Version 4.0 will require the old VMs to be converted. Luckily, 4.0 comes with a smooth utility to do it, including making a backup of VMs so that one may go back to a previous version of Parallels Desktop. Skipping the backup step is not recommended. It'll take plenty of time and drive space to complete, but be patient. Because of my limited drive space I backed up the old VMs to an external drive instead. That works too.

Overall I am quite pleased with Parallels Desktop 4.0's performance. The Parallels team definitely has a solid product to compete with industry goliath VMWare. Besides, I like to "think different."

Labels: parallels, virtualization, vmware, Windows