New Parallels Desktop beta with major new features

Filed under: News, Windows, Macintosh, Productivity, Shareware

New Parallels Desktop beta with major new features

by David Chartier Dec 1st 2006

Parallels Desktop, in my humble opinion, is a killer virtualization app that allows you to run virtually any OS, and even multiple OSes, in their own environments within Mac OS X. We've been following Parallels Desktop's development pretty closely over on TUAW, and today a new beta has been released with some rocking new features, including:

Booting a Boot Camp Windows XP installation, allowing you to have the best of both worlds (Boot Camp is Apple's free utility for allowing you to run Windows XP on a separate partition - not in virtualization)
Drag and drop files/folders between Windows and Mac OS X (previous, Parallels Desktop allowed you to set up a Shared Folder to accomplish this sharing task. This new feature, of course, is far cooler)
Read/Write of aforementioned Boot Camp partition
Parallels Transporter Beta - a new tool for migrating a Windows PC image, VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC VM into Parallels
Graphics performance and improvements (though, unfortunately, no full 3D hardware acceleration support - yet)

These Parallels guys just don't quit; since they introduced this Desktop product for Mac OS X, they have consistently added killer, innovative virtualization features like this. I can't wait to see full 3D support land "in a few months." I can't find an official announcement or link at Parallels' site yet, but here is a direct link to the 33MB download. If any of you try out the new features, share your experience in the comments.

Tags: apple, boot camp, BootCamp, mac, os x, OsX, parallels, parallels desktop, ParallelsDesktop, virtual, virtualization, windows

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Eugene Gordin said 7:06PM on 12-01-2006

I think the best feature they have in this new version is Coherence. It allows you to completely hide the windows environment except for running programs and the task bar. This way, you are using windows programs against your MacOSX background, which, for people like me who cannot stand being in windows for very long but have to, its quite sweet.

More info here: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/12/8602/

Little Neddy said 2:19AM on 12-02-2006

Using the boot camp otion doesn't work for me - all I get is a nasty "unable to open disk image Boot Camp!"

The new way of opening other instances of PD will take a while to get sed too.

Little Neddy said 2:22AM on 12-02-2006

By crikey, my typing is getting worse!! I meant to say:

Using the boot camp option doesn't work for me - all I get is a nasty "unable to open disk image Boot Camp!"

The new way of opening other instances of PD will take a while to get used too.

Anthony said 3:11PM on 12-07-2006

If I understand this correctly, I can now run a Boot Camp partition directly from Parallels while in OSX?

Basically, if I want full hardware/memory support under Windows, I can boot directly into XP using Boot Camp.

Or...

If I want to boot into OSX, I can then run Parallels to access everything that is available in the Boot Camp partition (OS settings, installed software, etc.) but with the limited hardware support as mentioned above (3D, etc).

(Sorry for the newbie question...I've been contemplating switching to a Mac and this sounds like the answer to my "If only Parallels allowed you to...." questions).

-Anthony

Greg said 1:18AM on 1-11-2007

Anthony you can do exactly that with this beta.
Parallels is an excellent product, however i had modified my partitions and bootcamp wont start (both my OS's do though)
Parallels wont see the XP partition that was created with bootcamp.
If this was possible i would definitely buy parallels!

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