Tag archive for 'bootcamp'

03
Dec

Parallels Desktop 3036 beta build out

By Damien Guard Categories: Apple Tags: , , , .

Parallels have released a beta build of their excellent virtual machine for the Mac and it's loaded with cool new features. Once out of beta it will be a free upgrade to existing owners.

The feature list runs something like this:

  • Drag & drop files between Finder & Explorer for copying
  • Boot from the Boot Camp partition (will require another activation and you loose suspend VM)
  • Read/Write to the Boot Camp partition (NTFS or FAT)
  • Use Mac clipboard cut/copy/paste short cuts in Windows (opt XCV)
  • Graphics performance increases of up to 50%
  • Windows auto resizes to Mac window size (about time)
  • Coherence mode puts Windows application on the Mac desktop & DockBar instead of in the VM window
  • Transporter lets you convert VMware and VirtualPC images to Parallels Desktop
  • UI has been revised & polished throughout to be more Mac-like

It's not all perfect though - some people have been reporting problems with Mac Pro systems and video driver support so waiting for a few days might be a good idea but it's great progress.

Microsoft have a number of VirtualPC images available including the Visual Studio Orcas preview and the Internet Explorer 6 test platform. With Transporter you should just be able to convert them and get going although I would imagine the copy of XP will baulk and require re-activation :(

Now we just need virtualised multi-processors, 64-bit support and hardware accelerated 3D ;-)

Parallels has gained support for hardware accelerated 3D and VMware support for multiple cores/processors since this post was published.

[)amien

2 Comments
24
Oct

Switching from Boot Camp to Parallels

By Damien Guard Categories: .NET and Apple Tags: , .

A few weeks ago I managed to screw up my Windows XP installation on my MacBook using some low-level tools and driver related stuff.

I'd already run out of space on the 30GB partition I'd allocated, I was missing the OS X side and not running any 3D applications so I took the plunge to remove the partition entirely and switch over to using the Parallels VM product I'd purchase instead.

Installation was a breeze and I soon had a clean XP install with Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, .NET Reflector, IE7 and a bunch of other useful tools for work operational again.

Whilst the speed isn't as nippy as the raw Boot Camp option was it's fast enough - certainly faster than the Pentium 4 box my client provided for development although having 2GB of RAM certainly helps.

With XP just running the dev tools this meant I could access my iTunes library on OS X whilst I work and get back to using Colloquay and Adium.

Safari crashes every time I try to blog post even though it doesn't even try to support HTML editing abilities so Firefox and Camino are my staple on the Mac side.

I use a dual-monitor configuration during the day and Parallels works like a breeze with OS X on one display and Windows on the other. The mouse just glides between the two seamlessly - no clicking in/out or awkward keys to press to jump between the two although Parallels did need to be manually told what the resolution was.

It seems I'm not alone in choosing this set-up.

All Parallels need to do now is to enable the virtual machine to utilise multiple cores and 3D acceleration and it would be perfect.

Well, switching over to a Core 2 powered MacBook Pro with 4-8GB of RAM might be perfection... and a bigger hard-disk...

[)amien

4 Comments
13
Sep

Inside Apple Software Update for Windows

By Damien Guard Categories: Apple Tags: , .

I was wondering whether Apple Software Update might search for and upgrade the various Boot Camp supplied tools and possibly drivers.

I did a little digging and couldn't find the answer but did spot that the Software Update sends a few interesting machine details to Apple's web server....

<key>ClientConfig</key>
<dict>
	<key>HW_Platform</key>
	<string>Windows</string>
	<key>HW_Make</key>
	<string>Apple Computer, Inc.</string>
	<key>HW_Model_String</key>
	<string>MacBookPro1,1</string>
	<key>HW_CPU</key>
	<string>Genuine Intel(R) CPU           T2500  @ 2.00GHz</string>
	<key>HW_Video</key>
	<string>ATI Mobility Radeon X1600</string>
	<key>HW_Ram</key>
	<string>2081088</string>
	<key>HW_Battery</key>
	<string>1</string>
	<key>SYS_Lang</key>
	<string>1033</string>
	<key>SYS_VERSION</key>
	<string>5.1.2600</string>
	<key>SYS_VERSION_STR</key>
	<string>Microsoft Win32s</string>
	<key>SYS_WMI_DISABLED</key>
	<string>0</string>
	<key>SW_QT_VERSION</key>
	<string>7.1.3.100</string>
	<key>SW_iTunes_VERSION</key>
	<string>7.0.0.70</string>
	<key>SWU_VERSION</key>
	<string>1.0.0.7</string>
	<key>SWU_CHECK_FREQ</key>
	<string>2</string>
</dict>

The software versions are fair enough but why it needs to report the Apple model, amount of RAM, video card, CPU details and whether you are running on battery is another matter.

It also adds a task to Scheduled Tasks to be able to check for updates at regular intervals - much preferred over a permanent background process.

[)amien

0 Comments

Feed

Feed count

Topics