C# Shiznit - Boot Camp vs Parallels Vol 2

posted on Thursday, June 22, 2006 by bobby @ 8:23 am

5 comments

New Ars Parallels ReviewFor a more in-depth review of how Parellels stacks up to Boot Camp, check out this review by Ars Technica, which includes benchmark tests.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/parallels.ars

This last weekend, I decided to give Parallels' new virtualization software another shot. I initially tried out Parallel's Desktop when it was in early beta. I mentioned it was a good "temporary solution". Being temporary, I uninstalled it a week later and went back to bootcamp. There were just too many little things missing.

Bootcamp was cool. Pros included being pretty damn fast, and.... well, that's pretty much all the pros. The cons were: trackpad is a little spastic at times, no twp-finger scroll, no right-click, unable to be in OSX concurrently, keyboard lumination no worky, and other minor things.

Parallels released the final product of Workstation for OSX so I thot I'd give it another go. Before I go into what I did and did not like about it, let me preface the following by saying my main goal is to run Visual Studio 2005 on in Windows XP at an acceptable speed. I am not using this laptop to play x86 games or any other multimedia operations, except occasional browsing and site testing.

I've now been using Parallels Desktop for Mac for about 3 days now and love it. The speed is great - great for a developer. Fast enough for compiling, debugging, etc, but not fast enough to watch full-motion video. Parallels also decided to bundle their compression product into Desktop, but they also upped the price $20. If you buy now, it's still only $50 for about another month.

The product has also been polished. The ugly UI that looked strangely out of place w/ Cocoa now looks pretty decent. The 32bit color problem is no longer an issue, as is fullscreen mode - which is pretty sweet when it transitions from OSX to fullscreen XP using the cube effect. File sharing between your two drives is as easy as mounting a network as a drive.

Since I made this site Safari compatible, I'm constantly switching between the two OS' two check the UI or tweak the code. Performance in both OS' is great, as long as you are not running process intensive apps. In my case, I'm usually editing a file or viewing said file in Safari.

Everything works - two-finger scrolling, keyboard illumination, righ-click, etc. Since my MacBook Pro is mobile, my wireless network is always changing, and since the Windows network just mirrors the OSX network, Windows is always up to date. I don't have to enter wireless network data (keys/pwds) twice. Once I update OSX, Windows works.

I highly recommend Parallels, enough to buy it myself. Gonna be tight when this kind of shizz is included in OSX itself.

CommentsComments

Not sure what version of Parallels you are using, but you might find this of use: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060622090404212

Nice, I'll have to check that out - looks interesting. I can't wait to see what they add to the next version of Parallels Desktop.

Cool. I'm glad I found this site. I'm a .NET developer and I was pondering buying a mac. The biggest thing stopping me was not being able to run Visual Studio on the Mac. But it looks like that is solved.

Dude - buying this MacBook Pro was a gamble (I really couldn't justify it but really wanted it) and it has turned out to be one of the best purchases I've ever made. No regrets.

Everything works great (MacBook 2,2ghz, 4g ram) exept one thing i cant figure out. Anyone tried to run a website from the os x file system? i tried to share user folder (documents/ pictures...) and put my VS folders in Documents, but the project wont build with this error: Error 2 Failed to start monitoring changes to 'Z:\Documents\new website'.

Any bright ideas anyone? Is it possible?

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