Parallels and Leopard: A Must Have for the Business Mac User
With a many business applications running off of Microsoft, Mac is still a pain in the butt to run in the business setting. The newest Operating System upgrade from Apple offers some relief with BootCamp, an application that allow you to dual-boot an Intel-based Mac in either OSX or in Windows.
Dual booting, for the most part, is really like running two different computers off the same hardware, though. Bootcamp is fine, but switching back and forth is not an easy task. Parallels has solved the problem, though and merged the two worlds into a world that simply doesn’t seem right! I’ve been running Parallels (thanks to friend, Bill) since its earliest versions.
When coherence was introduced, that’s when crazy stuff started to happen… having a dock, task bar and apple’s bar all in the same window just seems all wrong! Even worse? Dragging and dropping from Windows applications to Mac applications and vice-versa. Wow! The Mac vs. PC argument is put to rest, isn’t it?
No longer does a graphic artist, a Web designer, or an application quality assurance technician need multiple pieces of hardware to do something as simple as test for Cross-browser compliance. They can all run seamlessly off of the same Mac – in my case a MacBookPro.
When Leopard came out, it seemed my happiness was over! I corrupted XP and simply couldn’t get my applications to work like they used to. I was peeved, even taking the opportunity to write some of the folks over at Parallels personally. They were good guys and assured me that help was on the way!
Parallels and Leopard
This week it came! The latest upgrades for Parallels added some more features along with full Leopard compatibility. If you’re looking for a great application for your Mac enthusiast – this may be it.
If you’re a PC person and just plain frightened by these cool Mac people – this is your chance to still have the glowing apple on your laptop but run your good ‘ol apps in Windows.
I still haven’t worked up enough courage to get my first Mac. My step daughter swears by hers and her mom, my significant other, is always stealing her Mac because it supposedly is so easy to use. I grew up … (went from middle age crisis to over the hill)… on Windows and am hesitant to change. Will somebody give me a push in the right direction. Why should I buy a Mac. I need a new and lighter laptop.
Mac is the way to go, especially now with Parallels. Getting ready to install Leopard on my wife’s mac laptop. At my last job was pushing for a mac laptop to truly test cross browser on 1 machine rather than requiring a test lab.
I’ve had my Mac desktop for years and have not had any issues with it like i tend to using PC and windows.
I was thinking about getting this for my work mac, so I can test web sites on Windows browsers…I’m wondering how much of a resource hog it is?
It’s not too bad, Mike. For each OS instance you set up, you can set the amount of memory associated. I have 2Gb of RAM and have Windows XP running with up to 1Gb.
It doesn’t take much processor power to run either OS – but the applications you run in it will be hogs if they were hogs before.
I use VMWare Fusion, which I believe is a better option, as it’s more standardized. What are you going to do with your Parrallels Windows instance if you want to move to linux in the future? Not problem with Fusion…
Not sure Linux is in my near future from a desktop business user standpoint. With Parallels I can run all the business apps that I need. I can also run Linux in Parallels (I had Ubuntu up but really messed up my installation!).
I am a fan of virtualization and VMWare. I am actually moving our production environment to Bluelock, a company that’s mastered virtualization for hosted applications with VMWare.
Good to see you here, Dale! I saw the ExactTarget IPO paperwork was submitted to the SEC. Cool stuff!
A post about virtualization and the mac, and you only mention one of the major players? Where is the love for VMWARE (which I think is superior…just seems more “polished”).
Hi E.T.,
I’m afraid I’m a newb when it comes to VMWare and don’t have it up. I suppose it’s because everything I needed is working great with Parallels. As I wrote Dale above, VMWare will be a major part of our production deployment soon, though. We’ll be able to replicate environments and bring up different ‘flavors’ of our application next year.
I just upgraded Parallels to the latest version, and now Vista (Business) is requiring me to activate it again, and online activation doesn’t work. This also happens if you want to run VMware or Parallels in conjunction with bootcamp.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft is going to deal with virtualization and their activation process – something I’ve not thought about! Perhaps this is one of the advantages of going with Microsoft’s new virtualization package, Hyper-V!
Sneaky!
It is extremely agitating not to be able to utilize both the bootcamp form of Windows alongside the VMWare form because of the activation restrictions. (It sees the “hardware changes” and deactivates you when you switch to the other form).
I am no Windows hater by any means, but this is plain out frustrating when I purchased a legitimate copy of Vista Business.