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For a few months now I have been using a MAC for everything. I must say that aside from the fact that you have to learn a few new things this has been the best experience with a laptop that I have ever had. In fact, I dont use Windows unless I absolutely have to. That situation came up on Monday when I was teaching a MARS class online. When I started setup in the morning both my Windows Vista Desktop PC and my Windows XP Thinkpad T60 Laptop would not load the Centra Symposium Application. Since Centra doesn’t work on anything but Windows I quickly booted up my Vista install in Parallels and logged into the Centra Session with ease.

At First I was a little concerned that the audio would be poor going from a VM to a physical and so forth but I have to say it was seamless. I didn’t have any issues and I even jumped back and forth between the MAC and Vista. Drag and Drop works with ease and the USB pops up a question box when you connect it, just to make sure that you want Vista to see it. I also have sync’d my HTC 5800 Smartphone running Windows Mobile 6 with it and again- ease!

The Virtualization solution from Parallels (called Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac) allows nice integration between Windows and your Mac. Parallels calls this feature “Coherence” for its ability to hide the Windows desktop and make it appear as if your Windows applications are running directly on your Mac. VMware Fusion also has the same feature called “Unity”. It also works very well, although not with Windows Vista, yet.

With this feature Parallels Desktop now goes even further to deepen OS integration and create a seamless user environment.

I also found that Parallels Desktop is better integrated into the Mac OS desktop by means of registering file types with the Parallels guest applications, MS Office applications could be opened by simple clicking on them. You can also get Windows notifications on the Mac desktop – that is very cool.

Parallels also set up shared folders between OS X and Windows quite nicely. VMWARE Fusion asks you to do this manually.

Fusion lets you access Windows programs from its Applications menu. Parallels let you run programs from its Applications menu or the dock icon. Its like the Application is actually running on the MAC. For example, when you do a spotlight search for PAINT it returns the Windows Paint Application. Click it and it loads the Vista VM and opens the PAINT App in coherence mode.

You can open Mac files with Windows apps and Windows files with Mac apps (which means you have the ability to choose). For some time working with Parallels you can almost forget that you’re running two OSes!

Parallels has a Snapshot Manager feature which lets you save a copy of your virtual machine at a point in time. You can create a snapshot for a stopped or running virtual machine. When I created a snapshot of my Windows XP, it took about 23MB. Parallels also has a nice User Interface for managing the snapshots. You may have any number of snapshots and they can all be managed nicely. VMware also has snapshots, but they seem less robust.

With Parallels you don’t notice that you are working with virtual machine, it seems to be just a real machine with real applications. Parallels Desktop has excellent usability.

I am completely satisfied with Parallels, especially since they have a fairly active support team with forums, knowledgebase and all the other necessary stuff. I stand with Parallels!
I cant say enough about the product and I look forward to seeing what they do next. From a User that has been nothing but VMWARE for 5 years I give Parallels a total thumbs up and I’m sure you will too.

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