Boscos.org

Parallels released RC3 BETA with Vista support and since I have access to Vista via my MSDN subscription, I decided to try it out. The good news is that the install was very easy with RC3 as long as you create a new VM. I could not get the upgrade to work. The bad news is that Vista is a *lot* more sluggish than XP under parallels. My XP VM has 256Meg of ram allocated, but it still does basic things like surfing in IE, connecting via Outlook and VPN to my office network and running some small programs pretty snappily. My Vista VM had 740K allocated and was very slow. On top of it, the Vista experience itself was very underwhelming. It was close enough to being like XP to seem old and dated already, but different enough to be annoying in that you had to hunt for what you needed. Maybe running Aero makes it a lot better, but for now, I’m very happy with the Mac and don’t regret switching at all. Here is a screen shot of Vista under parallels:

While I was at it, I tried the Parallels “Coherence” feature which shows individual apps on the Mac desktop just like native apps. It worked great and was kind of spooky how it almost looked like a real mac app. Ultimately though, for what I do, running the guest OS in a window works better for me. Check out coherence: