Archive for February 14th, 2007
Oh, and it’s Valentines Day:
Found this on my friend’s blog (Sam Zaiss). Happy Valentines Day everybody:
Only possible on a Zune (thank you Microsoft.) Take that iPod!!!
Assessing Parallels
So, I have been using Vista on my computer for about a week now (You can read about it here). I thought that it was about time I give you all an update on how things are going.
First observation:
My MacBook hasn’t died! As silly as that sounds, I am very happy that running Vista (with Parallels Beta – Build 3150) has not, or at least does not appear, to be messing with Mac OS X. I have switched back and forth between the two operating systems quite a bit and the systems continues to operate smoothly. As a matter of fact, I have also worked in both operating systems at the same time, which brings me to my…
Second observation:
I LOVE the drag and drop feature in the new Parallels Beta. For the first time you can simply grab a file or an entire folder in one OS and drop it in the other. It even worked moving a Word document from Mac OS X to Vista. I was actually working on the document in Office 2004 for Mac and then dragged it into Vista (while still running Office for Mac) and opened it in Office 2007 inside Vista. The file opened, but it did so as a read-only file and only with the changes I had saved five minutes prior to opening it. Either-way, I was impressed.
Third observation:
Although, the overall performance of Vista on my MacBook is rather impressive, I am still disappointed with the graphic and sound output. Graphic fluency is still at miss and the sound quality is even worse. Playing a music file or even a movie within Vista is, at this point, impossible. I have spent some time (probably too much time) in Parallel’s support forum and it looks like they are going to incorporate hardware and graphic acceleration in the final build of version 2. Such support will definitely be a must – if one is ever going to use multimedia applications using Parallels.
Come to think of it, so far I have only run Vista within Parallels and have never tried running Vista natively. I wonder if I can use Apple’s “Boot Camp” with the same, already existing, Windows partition to boot Vista natively. Maybe that also will solve my graphic and sound troubles. I’ll give that a try and let you know how it goes.
Until then: Cheers,
Markus
