Product Reviews

Regardless of the superiority of Mac OS X, we know that - through choice or otherwise - the ability to run Windows is important to MacUser readers. Hitherto, the only option for Mac users was to run emulation software such as Virtual PC, but Apple's move to Intel chips opens up another option: virtualisation. And this is where Parallels Desktop for Mac comes in.

The role of virtualisation software isn't to pretend to be x86 hardware like Virtual PC - it doesn't have to, as the entire system is running on x86 hardware. Rather, it aims to provide a guest operating system such as Windows the ability to reach down through OS X and interact more directly with the processor and other components.

This brings many advantages, the most obvious of which is speed. Compared with Virtual PC, Windows XP running in Parallels Desktop for Mac feels incredibly snappy and responsive.

Further, with Apple's own Boot Camp technology, you have to reboot between OS X and Windows, but Parallels Desktop for Mac lets you have Windows running in a window within OS X, and toggle between the operating systems as easily as you would between iTunes and Safari. Better still, if your Mac supports desktop spanning, you could plug in a second monitor and have OS X running on one, while Windows runs on the other.

And it's fast, too. Running on a 2GHz MacBook with 2GB RAM (Windows XP SP2 allocated 1GB), the gruelling benchmark suite from our sister title, PC Pro, produced an overall score of 0.81, which is eminently respectable. This is performance most of us can really use, although it's not good for game playing. This has an impact on OS X performance, but you just need

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to balance resources yourself: idling, Parallels running Windows XP only took about 16% of CPU power, though some apparently inefficient cacheing techniques meant that a lot of your hard disk could be eaten up by virtual memory swap space.

In effect, it's a window in OS X, so you get full, Mac-like mouse control, including two-finger scrolling and, on the MacBooks, two-finger right-clicking.

Virtual machines are easy to maintain, too. Their hard disks are single documents. Keep a backup and all you need to do to restore your PC is to replace this document. Parallels can create disks of a fixed size or disks that grow up to a maximum size on the Mac.

Parallels includes a utility to resize (upwards only) and clean up hard disk images, but, even though you can increase the size of hard disks, Windows doesn't see the new space until it's properly partitioned and formatted, and there's no native way to repartition on the fly within Windows itself.

Mac users also miss out on the ability to create floppy disk images. No big deal if you're happy with Windows XP, but many older versions of Windows required a boot floppy before the non-boot CD setup could initiate.

Networking is pretty transparent, piggy-backing onto your Mac's connection, and the guest OS appears as a separate machine on the network. There's no way to drag and drop files from guest to a windowed host OS, but you can set up shared folders to transfer files. You can copy and paste text, though.

And our testing suggested that it's stable, with one exception: directly connecting USB devices was both slow (currently it only supports USB 1.1) and a little flaky.

Despite a few orientation issues - the slightly different keyboard layout foxed us a few times - and the erratic USB support, this is a great solution. The documentation could be smartened up and made a little more user-friendly, as could the interface, but even at the full price, it's great value. With virtualisation giant VMware making noises about entering the Mac market, and Apple's next operating system sure to extend the abilities of Boot Camp, Parallels will probably soon have some competition, but right now, this is the most convenient way to run Windows on an Intel-powered Mac.