Parallels RC for Mac Pro and Vista gets mixed reaction

Stan Beer
Monday, 11 September 2006 12:32

Your IT - Home IT

Virtualization software provider for the Apple Macintosh, Parallels, last week announced a release candidate (RC) version of its software that claims to have added support for the 64-bit Mac Pro platform, as well as Windows Vista and the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard system.

• Announcements

At present, Parallels has made the RC of its product a free update for existing users, claiming that will support the Mac Pro, which has two Core 2 Duo processors, fitted with up to 3.5GB of RAM.

In addition, Parallels says that the update offers full compatibility with the developer builds of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and experimental guest OS support for the beta builds of Windows Vista.

Parallels has been generally getting good reviews across the board for its 32-bit version that users have been running on MacBook and MacBook Pro, although a constant theme in blogs is that the software is memory hungry, requiring at least 2GB RAM to run with acceptable performance. Lack of support for USB printers has been another issue flagged by users.

Support for 64-bit processors and Vista have been lacking, with Parallels the company promising to address the issues. The result is the new RC update.

So far reaction from users have been mixed, with some users saying they have been unsuccessful in their attempts to get the new version working, while others report success.

We're still waiting for reports from testers who have been able to successfully run Vista RC1 in a virtual window on a Mac Pro using the new Parallels RC update.