03-10-2008, 11:42 PM

I've been using a pc for years, and finally, after enjoying my iphone so much, thought I would take the plunge. I just bought a new Macbook Pro on Friday, preinstalled with 10.5.2. It was advertised to work with parallel desktop and/or vmware. I need to have a working windows xp pro environment because of all the development I do in VS Studio.

Well, I installed Parallel and tried to get cohesion working, but the windows OS side could never access the Mac Safari or Mail program from files in that environment, even though I had set that up correctly. I tried Vista as well, retried XP pro several times, it just wouldn't work. Parallel's customer support is only open Monday - Friday, so I finally reached them today. It turns out that the introduction of 10.5.2 messed some things up in parallel, and they are working hard on a fix, but no release date has been announced.

However, I thought there might be a workaround. Apple support told me I could go back to the store and get 10.5.1 installed on the machine. I spent 2 hours there today, taking care of that. But guess what? 10.5.1 doesn't support the trackpad preferences or multi-track on the New macbookpros! I only found this out after hours at home wondering why I could only use the trackpad to click and move the cursor, with no other functionality. And the trackpad settings weren't coming up in the Keyboard preferences. After another hour with Apple, they finally told me that the new machines have a different hardware implementation of the trackpad, so 10.5.1 doesn't work on them.

Arghh!!!! So it appears that I'm out of luck, unless someone has a solution. I can't believe no one has posted about this before - there is nothing on the web, as far as I could tell, about this major problem. I also noticed that VMWare doesn't work correctly on the new Macbook pros either. Same exact behavior.

And I thought Macs were just supposed to work!

Alain (a frustrated first time mac user)

03-11-2008, 12:06 AM

why dont you just use bootcamp if you already have the windows disc. you just need to restart the computer if you want to get in windows.

03-11-2008, 10:55 PM

I need to use a lot of stuff on the PC side for now, and email documents from there as I am working from there... don't want to have two email systems. Or am I missing something?

03-16-2008, 07:31 AM

Is it just a Macbook Pro problem, as Parallels works OK with 10.5.2 on my Macbook?

03-16-2008, 08:30 AM

I have the new MBP and am evaluating fusion and already after a few days I dont wish to try any other software. Fusion does it all very smoothly and I have encountered no problems so far. In fact not one hitch or crash. Im not sure for the mail issues as ive decided to use leopards own mail.
If you use the unity mode you will find its just as good as using native software. However for this i rigged up 4 gigs of ram and gave 1 to xp. So try fusion.

03-16-2008, 07:56 PM

Referring to your e-mail problem. If you have IMAP setup for your e-mail account, it shouldn't matter if you have more than one e-mail system; and you will never miss a mail. Maybe you would want to check out if your e-mail account supports IMAP. It should solve your e-mail problem.