I am a Mac user, but have to use Visual C++ 6 (yes, that ancient version) for work. Is Parallels ready for me to use it full-time for professional use? I only need to run a few applications: Visual Studio 6, Office 2003, and some minor utilities (WinZip, WinRAR, EditPlus, etc.). But I need it to be 100% stable. Are the system freezes and hard drive corruption issues seen with the early betas now solved? I'm currently using Boot Camp, but would prefer not dual-booting if possible. My Mac is a 20" iMac 2.0GHz Core Duo with 2.0GB RAM and X1600 XT with 256MB. Parallels is especially attractive since I'll be upgrading to a Mac Pro once they're released, and would LOVE just moving my Parallels hard drive image to the new machine without needing to reinstall Windows... Comments?
Hi Daryl, I too have to do Windows programming for work and until now have used a Mac iBook and a PC laptop - accessing the PC laptop via the Mac version of Remote Desktop. However, now I run the MacBook Pro full time with Parallels. I use VC++ versions 6.0 and .Net for my Windows programming. I don't have any problems at all.
Also doing my Windows Development on my Mac, but using VS.Net 2003/2005. Now if only they would make the hard drives undoable, that would be sweet!
I'm in college and work on our robotics team. All of our development is in Visual Studio 2005 and I have been working perfectly fine. They kid me about running windows in vritualization let along on a mac, but deep down I know they're jealous ;-). I also do research with a professor and develop my code for him using Visual Studio 6.0 with no problems. This code is also compiled into MEX DLLs that can be run in MatLab, another problem with which I have had no problems.
Yeah my colleagues all use real PCs but they are jealous too. My XP boots much faster in Parallels than there's on real PCs (mainly due to large amount of anti-virus stuff they have to have installed heh). Also, the fact that I can copy and paste code/text between XP and OS X or vice versa is particularly impressive!
But are the system freezes and hard drive corruption issues seen with the early betas now solved? I used beta 1 through 4, and they were causing some people SERIOUS issues. Sometimes these betas were causing Macs to spontansously restart, with no system log entries. Even worse, some people were reporting hard drive corruption. Are these issues resolved? EDIT: I moved this question to a separate thread.
I'm using VS 2005 under Windows XP SP2 inside Parallels. I statred with Beta 4 and worked through all the versions up to RC2. I've never had problems during normal use. In an early beta, disabling and then enabling a core on the host processor caused a reboot. There have been issues with the VM hanging during sleep or the Mac failing to really go into sleep and sometimes getting stuc kin limbo. Suspending the session before putting the Mac to sleep works around that one just fine. So far, RC2 hasn't shown these problems.
