Parallels Desktop for Mac officially released!

Yay!

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/

Get it now for $49 (price available for the next 30 days). Normally $79, I think. Glad I pre-ordered, hehe.

Look's cool !!

Sweet. I should probably order a copy before it goes up.

UPDATE: So I ordered a copy. Do they send you a CD as well, or just give you the CD key?

iPodJon120 said:

Sweet. I should probably order a copy before it goes up.

UPDATE: So I ordered a copy. Do they send you a CD as well, or just give you the CD key?

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I believe just the CD key. It's only a 23 meg download, so if you're on broadband it only takes a minute or two. I can't remember if there was a CD option or not. At any rate, I opted just to get the CD key via email and download it off their website.

After you install it and mess around with it can you post your experiences with it? Pros and Cons?

alucard said:

After you install it and mess around with it can you post your experiences with it? Pros and Cons?

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Will do! My new hard drive for my Intel Mini comes in today, so I'll be testing it with a 2ghz Core Duo processor, 2 gigs of ram, and a 7200rpm 100gb hard drive. Ooh I'm excited!

kaidomac said:

Will do! My new hard drive for my Intel Mini comes in today, so I'll be testing it with a 2ghz Core Duo processor, 2 gigs of ram, and a 7200rpm 100gb hard drive. Ooh I'm excited!

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Is the new drive internal or external? If its an external what model/type did you get?

So is this like Boot Camp? Sorry but I don't quite get it.

iRizzo said:

So is this like Boot Camp? Sorry but I don't quite get it.

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With Boot Camp you need to reboot in order to from one OS to another (either OSX or XP).

With Parallels you stay within the OSX interface but you have a seperate window that has XP on it. It's like virtual pc or vmware, but hopefully much, much better.

So can you play Counter-Strike(or any Windows game for that matter) on it? Is it still possible to get a virus when running on Windows? Thanks.

alucard said:

Is the new drive internal or external? If its an external what model/type did you get?

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I picked up an internal 2.5" Seagate 100gb 7200rpm drive. I was originally planning on running Boot Camp on the Mini; had I known that Parallels would release an official version this earlier I would have just gone with a MiniStack v2. Boot Camp won't run with XP on an external hard drive, at least without a bit of a hack.

iRizzo said:

So can you play Counter-Strike(or any Windows game for that matter) on it? Is it still possible to get a virus when running on Windows? Thanks.

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Counter-Strike's performance would most likely be terrible. If you want to play games, get a MacBook Pro (good video card) and use Boot Camp. My brother is doing this with his; Half-Life 2 runs flawlessly at 1440x900 on his 15.4" MBP in XP through Boot Camp. Yes, it is definately still possible to get a virus when running on Windows. It most likely won't affect your OS X installation, however. If you take the proper precautions you'll be fine (don't visit bad sites or download illegal files; run a firewall, anti-virus app, and adware/spyware programs).

Ok thanks.

Yea, it's meant to run various OS's in a virtual environment not natively to run an OS or apps you can't run in OS X. I wanted this because I am taking an IT course and we play around with different OS's and I can set up a virtual Server/Client network with Windows and Linux without having to boot seperately into each OS on my Mac. I'll post how I like it later on when I get a chance play around with it. Unfortunatly, I read that PD can't run Vista Beta at this time yet.

iRizzo said:

So can you play Counter-Strike(or any Windows game for that matter) on it? Is it still possible to get a virus when running on Windows? Thanks.

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Games will not be playable because it is virtualization. You do not have direct access to the 3D accelerator in your computer because it is not the actual OS. The only way to play Window's games at this point on your mac is to install Boot Camp and run Window's natively.

Moved to correct forum. This is neither an Apple product nor an Apple rumor.

schweb said:

Moved to correct forum. This is neither an Apple product nor an Apple rumor.

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Knowing Apple it will be an OS X feature with the next release

It might be but last time I checked, this was not an Apple product.

Yeah virtual desktops are cool, but they tend to be RAM intensive and also processor intensive.. You're usually better off just swapping back in forth in my opinion.

All OS's take too much CPU and RAM to run multiple ones at the same time.

True, but you can control how much RAM a particular OS takes up and if you run just the OS with the exception of a few small apps, it should run pretty decent. Especially if you have upgraded to 2 GB of RAM.