Parallels Desktop

[Bill Marriott]

Firstly, what I meant to write is:

>>> 1) Ability to re-use your Boot Camp partition from within *MAC OS X*
>>> as a "virtual" drive.

Basically, under Boot Camp your Intel-based MacBook step into a telephone 
booth and become an exceptionally stylish Windows notebook. You hold down 
the Option key when the machine starts up. You get a menu with two icons: 
your Macintosh and the Windows drive.

- If you choose the Windows drive, you boot directly into XP or Vista. The 
Macintosh disk is not accessible to you within Windows. You are running with 
100% native Windows drivers for all peripherals, and Windows is taking over 
the whole machine, working directly with your hardware, as if you were 
running it on a DELL or HP laptop. Games run at full speed and take 
advantage of any hardware acceleration on the video card. There are zero 
compatibility issues.

- If you choose the Macintosh icon, you boot into OS X. The Boot Camp 
partition will show as a second hard drive icon on your desktop. If it was 
formatted with FAT32, you are limited to 30GB but you will be able to read 
and write files to that drive from OS X. If it was formatted with NTFS, you 
will only be able to read, not write, to that drive. Without additional 
software, you cannot run programs from the Windows side unless you reboot 
and choose the Windows icon.

- Under Parallels, you can create any number of virtual machines for various 
i386-based operating systems. Usually you have to create a "virtual disk" 
for each OS, which lives as a file on your Mac disk. The very convenient 
thing about the latest "RC" versions of Parallels is that they let you 
specify the aforementioned Boot Camp partition as the source of a "virtual" 
machine. Once you do this it has several advantages:

1) You do not need to purchase two copies of Windows
2) You do not need to waste hard disk space on a second "virtual hard drive"
3) Changes to the Boot Camp partition are reflected whether you use the 
native environment or the virtual one. You don't have to install your 
applications twice, etc.
4) You can use Parallels most of the time to access the PC-side, using Boot 
Camp only when necessary for the extra speed/compatibility it offers.

When running under Mac OS X, you have full access to your Boot Camp 
partition, applications and data. You can run any Windows application 
side-by-side with your Mac applications. You can drag-drop files from one 
environment to another. If you copy something in Windows, you can paste it 
into Mac, and vice-versa. (Regarding Bluetooth: My wireless Mighty Mouse 
works, so that's all I care about.)

- As for Coherence: It basically releases Windows applications from their 
"box." In every other "virtual" PC environment, when you launch the "guest 
operating system" it appears as a single window (or full-screen) with the 
whole PC and its applications therein. With Parallels Coherence, you have 
the ability to eliminate the Windows desktop and Start menu/task bar if you 
like. This presents any application to you under Mac OS X as its own window 
independently. It can be both jarring and eerie, but also very cool. It has 
the benefit of making it easier and completely seamless to switch between 
Mac and Windows applications. Screen real estate is conserved. Individual 
Windows apps can be added to your Mac OS X dock and launched directly from 
there. It doesn't feel like you're switching OS'es. The only way to tell an 
app isn't a Mac OS X program is the tell-tale blue Windows title bar.


"Ian Wood" <revlist at azurevision.co.uk> wrote 
in message news:337EB1C0-E804-4B70-B131-5C97143BFA98 at azurevision.co.uk...
> 1) Boot Camp sets up a new partition on your HD and you can install 
> Windows on that partition, then swap between Mac OS and Windows by 
> rebooting. For some hardware testing this is better than  virtualisation 
> as the OS is dealing with the hardware directly. For  instance, you get 
> access to the internal Bluetooth, which doesn't  (last time I looked) work 
> under Parallels.
>
> The beta version of Parallels let's you use this 'existing' copy of 
> Windows instead of needing a second install.
>
> 2) Windows application windows interleaved with Mac windows, instead  of 
> it all being kept within the Parallels window/desktop. Personally  I'm not 
> too keen as it's a horrible mess visually, but I can see the  attraction 
> for others.
>
> Ian
>
> On 20 Feb 2007, at 13:39, Jim Carwardine wrote:
>
>> Bill, can you give a few more details about the two plusses you  listed. 
>> Having only used Parallels and not Boot Camp I don't understand  point 1 
>> and having only survival knowledge of Windows, point 2 leaves me 
>> wondering as well... Jim
>>
>> on 2/19/07 11:32 PM, Bill Marriott wrote:
>>> 1) Ability to re-use your Boot Camp partition from within Windows  as a 
>>> "virtual" drive.
>>>
>>> 2) Coherence -- the ability to run Windows applications without  the 
>>> Windows