YES YOU CAN run Windows on a Mac!

The Obama administration ran into a few problems last week as the new staff took their seats in the White House offices. The Obama staff are used to running Mac computers, and the White House is full of nothing but Windows machines; a problem which left some of the staff unable to check e-mail, use instant messaging or even properly route phone calls. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post article:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos. 

Sometimes even the most devoted of Mac users need access to Windows software, and Parallels has a way to pitch in. I'd like to point our good friends in the White House to the free trial of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac - the perfect way to solve the crisis of OS depression. Contact us directly if we can help any further. We want to do our part. The new administration has enough to tackle right now, leave this one to us!

Show Me Your Parallels

I'd like to thank the academy, my Mom, my teachers, my high school choir, the hundreds of thousands of Parallels users out there, and most of all I'd like to thank my dog Watson Copernicus II - without whom none of this would be possible.

Oh, sorry, I'm skipping ahead. Parallels Desktop for Mac has won InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Award! With over 1,5000,000 users worldwide (and growing each day), it has been, and remains the best product out there for running virtual PCs on your Mac.

We barely wrestled the InfoWorld Award away from the new Eviscerator 5000 LaserBot, so congratulations to Cyberdyne Systems for putting up such a good fight. Of course, InfoWorld isn't the only source of happy Parallels customers, we met a bunch of them at Macworld 2008!

As you can see, Macworld and InfoWorld are similar M-class planets, 

both of which orbit a large glowing computer chip.

Parallels fans are easy to spot. They're the ones with the Parallels logo branded on their foreheads. Wait no, I'm getting confused with the new Cult of Parallels campaign that marketing has been developing. The Parallels fans are more like these nice folks:

 

These MacWorld attendees, and 40+ others, brought their Macs to the event - 

all running Parallels software!

A big thank you to all the people that stopped by the Parallels booth at this year's Macworld 2009! We loved seeing and chatting with you. There are more pictures of course, plus some video and customer quotes, all on our brand new community BUZZ page.

Stop by that page and submit your own pictures. Show us your Parallels! Everyone who participates in our program shall receive special goodies. The most faithful of participants shall receive their very own branding iron to initiate other members! Remember, aim between the eyes; you only get one shot... Oops hang on, marketing is now telling me they've completely dropped that idea. The new BUZZ page will suffice for now, enjoy!

Lucky Number 7

I've run Windows 7 on a few different machines, including both virtually and natively on my home desktop PC. Overall not bad on Microsoft's part, I'd say. Especially for being a beta. Impressive, even.

Now because my home desktop is dedicated almost totally to PC gaming, I skipped installing Vista on it due to the extra resources it takes up. Very picky, I know, but along with the initial driver issues with Vista I just had bad vibes putting it on my "prreciousssss". Office work is a different story. With enough hard drive space, I just set up a few different VMs and use whichever I feel like that day.

Switching from XP to Windows 7, the application and gaming performances seem about the same on a physical PC. Windows 7 doesn't recognize my desktop's Creative X-fi drivers, unfortunately, so I've had to use my older Creative SB Live! card and it sounds a little funky for some reason.

Out of curiosity, I ran the performance test in Relic Entertainment’s Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts on both Win XP and Win 7 with the same graphic settings (the Win installs are on dual-boot). At its best, Windows 7 actually scored a few (up to 5) frames per second faster than XP, however it also flubbed half the time and performed the test horribly, which I can't account for. It was as if Windows 7 flipped a coin: heads - it ran great, tails - weird performance at 17 frames per second max. 

Company of Heroes is a single-core game, but I assume Windows 7 64-bit takes much better advantage of a quad-core running single-core applications, not to mention an extra gig of RAM I had in the machine that 32-bit XP was unable to recognize.

It will be interesting to watch how the product evolves with further beta builds. For now I'm sticking with XP and Vista for anything other than play testing. Speaking of which, virtual machines make running pre-retail and test software a lot safer, because if it breaks you can roll it back with snapshots and if you don't like it, deleting a virtual machine hard drive is as easy as deleting a file. The same thing goes for testing in-development projects on virtual machines. You don’t have to worry about messing up the registry, deleting operating system files, anything like that. You can make your VM a disposable computer.

It's like a holodeck in Star Trek. If you break a chair or accidently vaporize the virtual bartender, just reset the holodeck and everything goes back to the way it was before. Just be careful, Mr. Data, that your VM doesn't become self aware and try to take over the ship.

I’ve heard about quite a few people actually using Windows 7 beta as a primary OS on their every-day work machines. To me that speaks of either supreme confidence in the Microsoft developers, or ignorance of the fact that you're, in essence, running a prototype of a stable product yet to exist. I doubt any of the Microsoft developers even run Windows 7 on an every-day work machine. If I decided to build a new rocket car, I wouldn’t drive it to work every morning while I was still trying to figure out the brake system. 

As long as they give beta releases out to anybody with a Hotmail account, there will be occasional meltdowns. Some will see the beta and think "oh look, free Windows! Time to upgrade." That's why Microsoft makes doubly sure to present the nice tidy legal document that nobody reads with the "I AGREE" checkbox below it. You play with the fire, senior, you will get burned!

Parallels at Macworld 2009

Macworld has arrived!

For those attending the Macworld expo, look for the Parallels team set up at booth 2138 in the main expo hall. This is right next to the big spinny Roxio thingy.

The Parallels booth will hold running demonstrations of our products for the duration of Macworld, including experimental support for Windows 7 in a VM and Snow Leopard as host on Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac. It's the perfect opportunity for people to see our software, ask questions and give feedback on their experience. 

For anyone interested in using Macs in the enterprise, Jason Krilich will be presenting on the use of desktop and server virtualization as part of the IT infrastructure. In addition, there will be a few quest speakers who will be talking about their experiences specifically with this technology. Check this out on Friday, Jan 9 at 1pm (MacIT Conference Track IT861). 

For those who brought their Macbooks, we're giving out 25 iTunes gift cards every day of the show to people who come to the booth and pose for a photo with their Parallels' desktop. Make sure to stop by and say hello to the folks in red shirts, we'll be waiting!

Enough about Macworld for the time being. In other news, Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac build 3810 is here and it updates quite a few things. The new build is available for free download either through our website or via the AutoUpdate under the Parallels Help menu when you start the program.

The full notes for this update are HERE.

As you can see, it's not all bug fixes and performance tweaks. The 3810 build introduces some new features, including the ability to drag and drop files onto the Mac OS X dock from your Windows desktop in order to open them in a Mac application; as well as the ability to silently start Windows in Coherence mode when opening Windows apps from your OS X desktop via SmartSelect. 

Both of these features aim towards the same goal: seamless integration between your native and guest operating systems. The more we can get OS X and Windows to co-operate, the better, and ideally a user should be able to treat the two as a single entity. If any readers have suggestions on how we can better accomplish this, go to our Facebook page and help us brainstorm.

To top off this build update, Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac now has better DirectX 9 support. This mostly consists of refining the video drivers Windows uses inside the VM. Since I'm a big gaming geek, I took the liberty of trying out the new improvements myself. Previous to this build update, my Engineer in Valve's Team Fortress 2 could run, jump, shoot and build to his heart's content; but he was unable to smile due to a compatibility issue with Valve's facial animation 3. Poor, poor Engineer. Ah, but now look at him after the update:

Laughing, talking, cheering... as happy as can be! Of course standing around laughing in the wide open means I was blown up by rocket fire about 3 seconds after this picture was taken. It was worth it, I tell you!