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Parallels - Thriving with a Mac
April 9, 2007

This post is a bit delayed because I spent the day playing with Parallels, that oh so wonderful virtual machine software for Macs. Oh yeah...did I mention that I am a newly converted Mac lover? And that the blog software being used for this blog doesn't work on Macs? 

With Parallels, though, all my troubles are drifting away. Drifting, like the snow that keeps falling here in upstate New York. What Parallels does is provide me with a virtual machine - literally a make believe computer that is run as a software, but thinks that it has its own hardware - so I can have a Windows computer as a "guest" inside of my Mac. When I double click on the Parallels icon to open the virtual machine, I get the same black startup, memory check, and then Windows XP loading screen that a normal Windows computer gets. The difference is that while my virtual Windows computer boots up, I can switch back over and continue that e-mail I was working on. Parallels makes it oh so easy to run my virtual machine as either a window or in full screen mode.

While this won't play games or run graphics intensive programs (for that you need BootCamp), it is a perfect answer for someone using a Mac who has to interact with the Windows only world of Publisher files, Windows Media files, and even the occasional blog software or other website. Parallels allows you to enjoy all that is great about a Mac, without the prior hassle of software incompatibilities.

Parallels costs $79 and is available from http://www.parallels.com. You must also have a full version (no upgrades allowed) of Microsoft Windows including an installation key which will run around $200 or so.

Posted by Chris Harris on April 9, 2007 | Comments (0)