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