Parallels today released Parallels Desktop for Mac beta 2 which features:
• USB 2.0 support – “Plug and play” popular USB devices like external hard drives, printers, and scanners, and use them at full native speed.
– Current Build 3094 doesn’t support isochronous devices such as web cameras, microphones, etc.
• Full-feature virtual CD/DVD drive – Burn CDs and DVDs directly in virtual machines, and play any copy-protected CD or DVD just like you would on a real PC
• Improved Coherence mode – The groundbreaking feature that lets you run Windows applications without seeing Windows just got better! Now you can:
– Place Windows applications on your Mac desktop or in your application dock. Just click to launch them directly from OS X!
– Use Command+tab to cycle through Windows and Mac applications simultaneously, and “hide and show” Windows applications just like you would with Mac applications
– View the Windows Command Console in Coherence mode
– Use Coherence in Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista!
• Better Boot Camp support – Using your Boot Camp partition in Parallels Desktop is now easier than ever. Beta2’s Boot Camp support includes:
– Full support for FAT32 and NTFS partitions
– Easy offline configuration. Simply tell Parallels Desktop that you want to create a virtual machine from a Boot Camp Partition and click start. No complicated set up required!
– No need to re-activate Windows each time you switch between Boot Camp and Parallels. Activate Windows only once inside Parallels and work in both environments
More info and download link here.
Let’s face it, the folks at Parallels have done far more in the way of development in the last 6 months than Connectix and Microsoft did combined in 6 years when it comes to running Windows on a Mac.
Bravo Parallels, Bravo.
Hammer time
sry but macbill appears to be a fud engineer
TTzz,
u should only be asked to reactivated windows, not enter a new product number.
the reason is simple, windows requires a new activation every time the hardware changes so much that it thinks it’s on another machine.
parallels “presents” a completely different PC to windows than boot camp, that is inevitable.
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macbill
1 this is a beta
2 they just solved the problem u describe
3 your problems don’t contradict in anyway what we are saying about this program
by the way, i want to make a distinction between brilliant programming, and great applications, parallels desktop is the result of incredible programming, on the mac, but also on the windows side (so the remarks about apple doing everything for them are unrealistic and unfair)
but this is not the greatest application ever, it’s too “thin” to deserve that title.
my contenders would be mac paint, early versions of photoshop (before the layers), system 7 finder, and myth II (joking, but it has some great features no other game ever got right), and my favorite ever, hypercard.
back to parallels, not only are they doing a great job, but they are extremely responsive, fast thinkers, they seem to have new ideas every week.
maczealot,
My company maintains TWO websites that ONLY work with IE. Unless I wish neither to work, nor get paid, I need a ‘Doze solution on my company provided Mac.
fsck’n proprietary JavaScript!!!
I just love the fact that we are basicly getting a “Classic” type of windows environment to transition our Windows apps into the mac OS. I’m sold and will try parallels now. I have a boot camp partition and a copy of Windows on my MacBook and I’m ready to test this with some apps at work. If this works for Arbitron apps it’s game on! Then I can start giving my sales people macbooks and have them run their Windows apps in a sandbox, and be able to roll back to previous virtual machines if a virus should strike. Love it.