Parallels Desktop for Mac Intel Mac

When Apple introduced its first generation of Intel-powered Macs, the "Are you a Mac or a PC person" question suddenly became moot. With the new Intel Mac machines, you can have the best of both Macintosh and PC worlds. Unfortunately, switching between operating systems on the new Intel Macs can be a time-consuming process. You must completely shut down OS X and endure a full start-up cycle in order to run Windows. That's where Parallels Desktop for Mac comes in. With Parallels Desktop, you can run Windows applications along with your Macintosh programs -- right on your Mac, side-by-side -- so you never have to suffer through frustrating shut-downs and re-boots just to run a program you want.

Parallels Desktop offers the unparalleled option of letting you switch between Mac OS X and Windows XP with a single keystroke. So while you're running a graphics program that only OS X can run, and you need to use an important application that is only available in Windows, you simply hit a keystroke, and Windows (or OS X) is literally at your fingertips. The same holds true for Linux or any other operating system; with Parallels Desktop, you're always a single keystroke away from switching out of OS X into the operating system of your choice, and back into it again.

Creating a Virtual PC
With Parallels Desktop, you can run any version of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, Me, 2000, NT, XP, 2003), any Linux distribution, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation, or MS-DOS alongside Mac OSX. The program installs with just a few clicks and steps through a simple interface. You don't have to be a software engineer to install Parallels Desktop; there's no need to partition your drive, and no networking or complicated set-up required. It's really that simple.

Once you're up and running, Parallels Desktop virtualizes a full set of all the standard PC hardware, including virtualized processor of the host computer, a generic motherboard compatible with Intel i815 chipset; up to 1500 MB of RAM; VGA and SVGA with VESA 3.0 support; up to four IDE devices that may be either virtual hard drives (from 20 MB up to 128 GB each, mapped to image file), CD/DVD-ROM drives (mapped to physical drive or to image file), or any combination of the two; Ethernet virtual Network card compatible with RTL8029 (bridged to Apple Ethernet or Apple Airport adapter), host-only Networking or Mac Internet sharing; up to four serial (COM) ports (mapped to pipe or to Output file); up to three bi-directional parallel (LPT) ports (mapped to output file); and 2-port USB controller 1.1 (USB 2.0 devices supported) at speed close to native. In other words, you can operate as if you were actually on a fully-loaded PC.

You also have the ability to transfer files and folders between OS X and Windows. This means that you can safely and securely "copy and paste" data between Windows XP and Mac OS X programs without a glitch. And if you think that this will add a huge drain on your computing resources, think again! Included free with Parallels Desktop is Parallels Compressor technology, a $179 tool that reduces Windows 2000, 2003 and XP virtual machine hard drive size by 50 percent or more. This easy-to-use disk management tool helps save storage costs, maximizes hard disk resources and improves the performance of any Windows-powered virtual machines.