Latest Parallel release supports internal iSight

wait a second, i can use my Boot Camp Windows XP partition as a bootable drive in Parralells?

CYNIC821 – YES!!

I use it although I have to admit it boots MUCH slower than I’d like. It might be because it is NTFS-partitioned. I converted it that way to overcome an early bug in the capability.

I think the 3D stuff will be good for Vista users, but if you want to play games or do heavy 3D stuff, you might be better off rebooting. Parallels is nice, but running XP with a couple web browsers (for testing) and on my MBP with 1.5GB RAM I am running out of memory. I use Dreamweaver 8, Keynote, Photoshop CS3, Safari, Firefox, iTunes, Mail, Graphic Converter, SnapNDrag plus whatever else I might need from time-to-time.

What I’ve found is that Parallels uses all of the 415MB of active memory I allow it plus 2GB of virtual memory. My kernel task goes up to 1GB and Window server goes to half a GB. I barely have enough room to swap memory.

Maybe it is because I run Coherence mode across two monitors? I dunno, but Parallels is costly. It is good for when I need it, but I wouldn’t be counting on it for high-performance computing.

Parallels is one of the most impressive development efforts I’ve seen in my 14 professional computing years. I have had every publicly-released version.

Version 2 should have 3D capability, but I have no idea how they intend to do it. Perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen it yet.

I’m awaiting 3D support but I doubt I would actually use it to play games… I just assume it will increase overall performance by freeing up some processor and ram and putting more of it on the actual video card.

Noraa: I second your thoughts; I too use coherence mode exclusively across my MBP and gateway 20″ lcd and have heavy active/virtual ram usage; though this latest beta seems to have curbed a lot of the slowdown/ram issues I was having. Of course the disclaimer of it being a beta is there, and I fully understand that, which is why I’m not too upset about slowness from time to time with just using napster and/or ie6/7.

I was originally pumped about 3d support, but since the only game I play is world of warcraft from time to time is actually natively supported in OSX, then it sort of negates my needs for 3d.

Anyway, enough rambling. Parallels does indeed rock, and I hope it continues to improve at the pace it has been thus far.

After 3D support, I would like to see a freeze on new features and some work on the UI. The UI has become less and less “Mac like”, doing things like launching multiple copies of Parallels.app to run multiple VMs, quitting Parallels.app after closing the last window, and strange inconsistencies, like the list of VMs forgetting certain VMs, and not allowing them to be re-added (at least not apparently easy).

With that said, however, Parallels has impressed me a lot, other than their tech support. 5 emails, 2 phone calls, resulting in zero contact with a human. At least their forum has a lot of experienced users willing to help out.

iSight was what i was waiting for… now Parallels it’s complete to me =)

I know you can run Parallels from your Boot Camp partition, but does anyody know if it is possible to create a Boot Camp partition *from* a Parallels virtual drive? I don’t want to have to reinstall all my applications and everything again, but would like to be be able to boot into Windows occasionally..