New Macbook Pro and Parallel - Nightmare and No resolution!

I've been using a pc for years, and finally, after enjoying my iphone so much, thought I would take the plunge. I just bought a new Macbook Pro on Friday, preinstalled with 10.5.2. It was advertised to work with parallel desktop and/or vmware. I need to have a working windows xp pro environment because of all the development I do in VS Studio.

Well, I installed Parallel and tried to get cohesion working, but the windows OS side could never access the Mac Safari or Mail program from files in that environment, even though I had set that up correctly. I tried Vista as well, retried XP pro several times, it just wouldn't work. Parallel's customer support is only open Monday - Friday, so I finally reached them today. I was told that the introduction of 10.5.2 messed some things up in parallel, and they are working hard on a fix, but no release date has been announced.

However, I thought there might be a workaround. Apple support told me I could go back to the store and get 10.5.1 installed on the machine. I spent 2 hours there today, taking care of that. But guess what? 10.5.1 doesn't support the trackpad preferences or multi-track on the new macbook pros! I only found this out after hours at home wondering why I could only use the trackpad to click and move the cursor, with no other functionality. And the trackpad settings weren't coming up in the Keyboard preferences. After another hour with Apple, they finally told me that the new machines have a different hardware implementation of the trackpad, so 10.5.1 doesn't work on them.

Arghh!!!! So it appears that I'm out of luck, unless someone has a solution. I can't believe no one has posted about this before - there is nothing on the web, as far as I could tell, about this major problem. I also noticed that VMWare doesn't work correctly on the new Macbook pros either. Same exact behavior.

And I thought Macs were just supposed to work!

Alain (a frustrated first time mac user)

 

Hi,

i use Parallels and a MBP in a similiar environment (Oracle development and VS Studio and Delphi). I run 10.5.2. and Parallels (since 1.0 beta) build 5584.

Just turn the "advanced" coherence features off (application sharing) and share your work via a psf (parallels shared folder) mapping.
I mapped my projects folder to drive e: and access all those files there stored happily on my mbp's mac partition, be aware this will give you a little performance hit over the "pseudo" network.

Also keep you window installations clean of any data. It seems more reliable to me to have time machine backup all my files except the windows virtual machines (which i do backup once a week).

Feel free to ask more. I can tell you my settings in parallels i you like to have them.

 

Same here,

I use Parallel and VS2005 on my new MacBook Pro (received it last friday, and restored from my old MacBook Pro time machine backup) and it works beautifully. I do not use coherence as I like to have my OS's separate.

What I do is have an external monitor plugged in at home and my Parallel Windows XP is running full screen on that monitor.

I use a CSV server on my OS X machine to store my source from the windows side and time machine does the backup of that source.

So my windows doesn't have any write access to my OS X.

 

Thanks guys... I'm wondering if your settings will work for me. Because I have a full ms office 2007 business on the windows side, including ms access which I use often to access sql server databases, I would like to continue using ppt, word, excel etc on the guest side. And I'd like to continue to EASILY email those documents by clicking on the "send to email recipient" from inside those programs, but using mac mail. I know that is how it is supposed to work. I can't see myself, while editing a document, saving it, then opening the folder where it was saved, then dragging it to Apple Mail - lots of extra steps for what should be one click. Any ideas as to how to still allow this to happen? Also, does anyone have any insight into when parallels might be coming out with a working release? Thanks. --- Alain