Parallels Beta 5

[EddieR]

Well the newest Beta is out, and yes full screen is great, so is the cube effect; eventhough I rather see the effect you get when you go into and out of Front Row, but what I really want is the abilty to burn DVD and CD's as of now all you get is a CD/DVD reader. USB has also been implemented but it's only a 1.1 not the 2.0 I am accustomed to, they even include a file sharing feature, which is great, now you can share your Mac and Windows files, all in all I give it a 3 out of 5 but again it's still in beta, and the Parallels team has done a great job with their upgrades from beta 1 to now, I hope Beta 6 introduces burning....

[suleiman]

Eddie, I just ran parallels on my MacBook Pro, and I have to say the quality and consistency of the features are simply astonishing to me.

 

I can understand we each have our own core features to seek out, and I commend you for recognizing the tremendous effort of the parallels team despite not seeing your specific request implemented yet.

 

I love this app.

[EddieR]

suleiman,

 

It's a pleasure to read your posts, but who should be commended is the Parallels Team, and yes, I too think Parallels is a great program, I even pre purchased it, I for one prefer running windows in the background and not have to reboot.

[XanthraX]

What I want is to enable booting windows from a partition, not only from an image (like in VMWare). I would to use my windows partition under Parallels, not to waste my space making an image.

[suleiman]

Xantrhax I'm with you there. In fact, the inability to be able to use my boot camp partition was a big part of my motivation for not jumping into the parallels band-wagon.

 

Perhaps the single biggest factor that changed my mind was the relatively quick conclusion I came to after installing Boot Camp: I rarely, if ever, booted into Windows. As most of the people here can attest, OS X is the hands down operating system of choice, and unless you're using your Windows install to run games or CPU intensive applications like Photoshop, Parallels will fit to 90% of your everyday needs.

 

Of course if you do need your Windows running at native speeds all of the time, you'll have to wait for the Parallels team to pull a rabbit out of their hat; from what I understand, booting from physical volumes in Parallels is an unlikely prospect.

[EddieR]

Beta 6 has just come out, and no, no update for a dvd writer ? this version has expanded the USB capabilities as well as some video settings, but again, no DVD writer, and I wonder if they will be able to make a 3D driver for video?, personally I like Parallels but again I give it a 3 out of 5 stars, there's nothing better than running windows as a native with all the bells and whisles....

[Colonel]

It still runs terribly, terribly slow on my Celeron D. This is pathetic.

[gooki]

Get a real Mac or a proper processor that supports VT-X then.

[Proteo]

As most of the people here can attest, OS X is the hands down operating system of choice, and unless you're using your Windows install to run games or CPU intensive applications like Photoshop, Parallels will fit to 90% of your everyday needs.

 

Photoshop CS 2 runs just fine here, I'm using it to do all my web design work, and some of my files have more than 60 layers. Actually I'm quite impressed with its performance, being an emulated app. It is not too much slower than their windows counterpart, specially disabling layers thumbnails and reducing cache. Illustrator takes its time to load, but once it's in memory is quite responsive too.

 

However I used to have an Athlon SS2-only machine and the same apps were much less usable. That leads me to believe that SS3 makes a world of difference when using Rosetta. Now tell me about Dreamwaver... that's a different story.