Parallels Desktop and Coherence

In the recent release candidates for the next version of Parallels Desktop for Mac they've offered a new feature called "Coherence". Essentially what it does is let you minimize the Windows desktop and let your Windows programs run on the Mac desktop, even having the different programs in the OSX dock.

I'd been planning to install Parallels for a while, so this was finally my impetus to give it a try.

The installation was fairly straightforward. I chose the express install, provided the Windows CD key, and Parallels got XP up and running in a window in around 30 minutes. In the meantime, I was able to answer some e-mail and play a web-based game on Safari while Windows installed.

Took another 30 or so minutes to get Windows updated with all the patches, also running basically as a background task, and I was ready to go.

Coherence worked as promised. I basically have the Windows Start Menu right under the finder bar and any Windows applications I launch appear in the dock. I can even check the option to keep them in the dock and they remain after Windows/Parallels is shut down. If I click them, Parallels launches and then they open.

Checking my system activity monitor, Parallels is consistently using about 8.5-9.5% of CPU (both when I've had no applications running and when I had 3 applications loaded but not actively doing much), but it's worth noting that because this is a dual-core system, that's out of 200% available, not 100%. It uses around 250 megs of real memory and 2.18 gigs of virtual memory, plus about 2.3 gigs of disk space.

Here's a screenshot of my MacBook Pro, running a Firefox 2.0 for Mac window where I'm composing this post, Internet Explorer 7 on the homepage for IrfanView (one of the graphics utilities I've missed most since leaving Windows), an IrfanView window where I'm editing a screen capture, and you can see icons down in the dock for WinAmp, Crimson Editor (my favorite simple text editor), Internet Explorer, and IrfanView.

Even better than that, I took the screenshot and saved it to my OSX desktop, then dragged and dropped it onto IrfanView, running on Parallels, without a hitch. I was able to do a quick resize, sharpen, and save it back to my desktop... boom boom boom... that easily.

In fact, sharing files between Windows and your Mac is fairly simple. It's not quite as simple to get at your Windows-based files from your Mac applications, but in Windows, your Mac hard drive is treated like a network drive and you have quick and easy access to the files on it. When opening/saving a file in a Windows application, you go to "My Network Places", select "Entire Network", and then select "Parallels Shared Folders". In default install, that takes you to the root of your Mac hard drive.

The only time the illusion of ease begins to break down is if I haven't yet launched Parallels and just click on one of the icons in the dock. It will take a little while for Parallels to launch, boot up Windows, and launch the app. If Parallels is running and Windows is running, they launch quickly. But if you haven't booted Windows... not so much.

A couple of caveats, though, if you're planning to run Windows apps in Parallels, using Coherence to make them seem like part of your Mac desktop...

• Turn off the Windows screensaver. If you ignore Windows while you're working in Mac applications, the screensaver can pop-up, blanking your normal wallpaper.
• Before you go from a windowed Windows desktop into the Coherence mode, match the resolution of the Windows display to the resolution of your Mac display. If you don't, the Windows application windows will be stretched to compensate and won't look good.

I don't miss the big, behemoth applications I used in Windows. For those, I've found Mac versions or reasonable substitutes. The things I missed from Windows were items like IrfanView and a few other freeware/shareware apps that did one thing very well and didn't have comparable matches over on the Mac side.

The combo of Parallels and a copy of Win XP (or even Vista) isn't cheap. Parallels alone is $79.99. So, paying that for a few "little" apps might seem to be bad economic logic. But the fact is, you're not searching all over heck to find a Mac-based replacement for them and you're not having to pay $10-50 for the shareware license for the Mac-based replacement. The value of that time and the cost of those shareware licenses can quickly add up.

But more importantly, when you look at Linux, Windows, and Mac, none of the platforms are perfect and they each have certain little apps that are wonderful. With the X11 tools for Mac (which come on your OSX install disks) and Parallels Desktop for Mac, you really get the option of creating the perfect computer, running the best software from all three platforms as if it was all one platform. That's very cool!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 1:31 am and is filed under Techno Thoughts, Technology & Life.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.