As the proud owner of a MacBook Pro, I have finally had the opportunity to give Parallels Desktop a try. I have thus far installed Free BSD 6.1, Suse Linux 10.1, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. All have worked flawlessly and have run at totally acceptable speeds (I have used VirtualPC in the past and found it generally to be so slow as to be unusable).

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mac, osx, developing, linux, suse, windows xp, windows 2000, parallels

Of course I still had to run apply about 70 updates to each of the Windows installations, but that‘s not Parallels’ fault!

Installing the Parallels Tools (under the VM menu, Windows installations only) makes a big difference - Windows 2000 would only give me the option of 640 480 or 800 600 screen resolutions without the tools installed. It is also a real time saver being able to just move your mouse out of the VM window and have it swap back to operating the Mac.

Funniest thing is that rebooting the VM is sooo much faster than rebooting a real machine. Kind of obvious if you think about it, but still cool. Of course most of the time I‘ll be leaving the VMs in a ’paused' state.

Now to try getting 4 different versions of Internet Explorer running at the same time!