I really should start a blog. But until then, I'll post my random thoughts here, in this forum.

Today I tried Parallels Desktop. It's something I've been wanting to try for some time. I've had an Intel iMac for nearly a year, and installed Windows XP via Boot Camp when I first got it. Boot Camp is fantastic. You restart, and within 30 seconds, Windows XP has finished loading, and you can play the latest games, like Doom III, on your iMac. It really is like a real PC.

I had heard that Parallels is fast -- nearly as fast as a real PC, plus you don't have to restart. That's nice, because restarting requires you to close open documents (I jot down the day's "To Do's" in Notepad, and then I have to find a palce to save this where I'll remember to open it later), close applications, etc. Basically shut down everything you're doing. Plus transfering files to Boot Camp is a pain -- I've ended up emailing them to myself. Parallels lets you just drag and drop.

Unfortunately, once Parallels finished installing, I found it was just too slow for me. Mainly starup, shut down, AND everything on your computer AFTER you quit Parallels STILL runs really slow! I probably don't have enough RAM for it, because that's the only reason why my whole computer would be slow even after quitting Parallels. I have 1 GB of RAM, but I probably need more like 2GB to avoid paging things to the hard drive. (Switching to any program results in a delay of 10-30 seconds while it pages that program's RAM back into memory.)

In the end, I found myself wanting to restart after quitting Parallels just to avoid the memory paging. Which defeats the purpose of using Parallels -- to avoid having to restart.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot... Windows XP is an annoying littlle brat that requires you to re-activate it because "your hardware has significantly changed since you last ran Windows." That's right, even though Parallels is simply using my existing Boot Camp installation of Windows XP, Windows still requires me to re-activate it for the parallels "installation". So Microsoft wants me to pay for Windows twice if I use it in both Boot Camp and Parallels. How lame. I remember reading about this, but I had forgotten about it.

So in the end, Parallels just isn't worth it to me. It's actually far *faster* to reboot into Boot Camp than it is to start up Parallels. So that's what I'll continue to do, and I suppose I'll just have to keep emailing files to myself when I want to transfer stuff from OS X to Windows XP.

Of course, Parallels is stilll a great solution for some people, especially those who need to transfer stuff between Windows and their Mac on a regular basis. I'm not saying it's a bad product. It's just not for me.

Vern,

Are you on an Intel Mac? I'm only running 1G and I'm not having major slowness issues. Granted it doesn't run like my Dells which are only P4s but it does do the job for what I'm doing including some programming in a common package for OSX, Win??, Linux. Even when I'm doing blitted graphics with 1024 X 768 window sizes (on WinXP) I don't see any staggering and most of the time I have my (Mac) email up and running. I did bump my Parallels memory up to 512M and I tend to stay away from things like running Photoshop, DAZ, Bryce and Parallels at the same time, try that if you want to see a Mac choke!

Again, goes back to what you said, doesn't work for you even though it does for me.

Joe B

The expert that answered my (Vern's) question has 5 GB RAM!