This week I will be mainly playing with ...

[GrumbleDook]

Here is a little something from Codeweavers that I will be trying out over the next week or so.

I have moved away from Parallels back to a Boot Camp install ... but there is still the odd piece of software that I would like to have to hand immediately instead of rebooting.

[dagza]

What made you move back?

I have been playing with both over the weekend and didn't have much luck with crossover. There are a number of little windows apps I wanted to play with but none of them worked. IE even managed to crash lots of times (gasp). It felt very alpha and more of a novelty than a replacement.

[CyberNerd]

I ran crossover office on linux for a while and had no problems with office 2k and IE. Also wine by itself runs a lot of simple apps well.

"IE even managed to crash lots of times (gasp). It felt very alpha and more of a novelty than a replacement." - no change from native IE then.

[GrumbleDook]

What made you move back?

I was just finding that a number of things were making the machine run rather slowly and be temperamental.

I could not leave Mail and Firefox running at the same time as having Parallels was open with SIMS and another database.

iPhoto and Parallels made it slow ...

A number of apps in Parallels went slow too; IE7, MS Access, Hot Potato, Visio, Project, GanttProject ... and the list went on.

For some staff it will be fine, just not for me.

[dagza]

Similar experience here.

I haven't tested it as extensively as you but it certainly seems to be a no-no using both operating systems at the same time.

I plan to use it to run those apps needed for work which you can't get on a mac (eg access) and if I am doing something else at the same time (don't we all) then use the virtual XP to do that also and leave the mac doing nothing until I shut parallels down.

Think I will also push the ram up from 1 gig to 2 (been looking for an excuse)

[HodgeHi]

What amount of RAM do you have? I run a simple parallel running WinXP sp2 and have no problems with it. I run it on a MBP with 2GB of RAM. I have also tried this on a Mac mini with 512 and the results arent really that great. I plan to upgrade the memory to 2GB also.

[dagza]

I have 1 gig on an intel imac. I remember when that was a lot of memory

[GrumbleDook]

1 gig of memory on a MacBook ...

Going to bite the bullet this weekend and move onto Vista ... try it first on parralels and then do it on my boot camp install.

I never really got round to trying things in anger with crossover ... the performance was similar to parralels ... but it was a bit buggy too ... 15 crashes in one day that have not happened since I stopped using it.

[dagza]

I noticed parallels havbe an upgrade for vista so was thinking the same

Gave up with cross over. Hardly anything worked. Pretty pointless IME and the novelty factor of MS dialogue boxes on a mac very quickly wore off :?

[Roberto]

I think sometimes we forget that while virtualisation has been around a while, it was a pretty static thing for a lot of that time with no real new developments. We're really not that far out of "The miracle isn't how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all" territory.

[HodgeHi]

I have installed Vista using parallels. You need the latest version of Parallels to install RC1 as it will fail otherwise and also be aware that you won't get the aero features unless you can get the ati drivers installed. This as far as i can see is the same with the updated version released today.
performance...not too bad really considering it is Windows.

[HodgeHi]

Also remember that the macbooks take some of the memory for graphics. Thats so not a good thing really. Don't know why they did that.

[kingswood]

I have Parallels on a MacBook Pro 2.16GHz with 1GB RAM. It works fantastically. But as mentioned it doesn't steal RAM for graphics (it has 256MB for itself). I use Parallels with XP and Server 2003; if you use the guest OS in fullscreen it's basically the same as running the OS from Bootcamp. And the VM is portable. I can take a copy of my XP VM and put it on a DVD, transport it to my iMac and load it on there using Parallels.

Speed? Well, it runs C# and the .Net IDE very well, networks, IE is fine (actually pretty fast) and videos etc as "normal". I haven't really bothered shutting down things like iPhoto because it wouldn't have been a true test. Everything seems fine.

Vista? Sucks. Virtually and natively. The OS just sucks. In my opinion :-)