Parallels brings the Mac OS to the business user

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lithe951

Member
What's the old cliche? That you always hear the bad and never the good? Well there's been a lot of that here lately with the Mac Pro issues (they really are releasing fast, if you've never done development you don't understand just how fast), and some other things, so I wanted to say kudos.

I'm a business user now (don't do dev work any more) and I've always wanted to "switch" but have never been able to. I spend all my time in mundane applications like Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Project and Visio, and a few Windows-only apps. The Mac has always been great for graphic designers and with OS X, great for developers. But the biggest market out there has been tough to switch. Until now.

I'm a boring business user and I've switched to a Mac, made possible by Parallels and Intel. WOO HOOO! I've been working on build 1848.2 for two months solid and

ZERO PROBLEMS.

Everything I need to accomplish has been easy, fast and problem-free. When there's a full release I'll upgrade my version, but I really don't need to.

THANKS!

Mark
 
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There is a cool Parallels stories thread in the Announcements forum. I'm sure the Parallels people would like you to post in there too.
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Yep, I've read the cool stories thread, but this seems to be where the action is. And it's where I've seen most of the complaints too, so I wanted to bring it up that in the big picture of things, Parallels accomplishes 80% of what most users need. Might even be higher. They've done a great job. I'm using a 15" MBP and it just works, no fuss, no problems.

My nice-to-haves would include support for native mouse drivers and better video, but that's it. I'm used to Logitech's acceleration feature and that's probably my #1 request.

So far it does absolutely EVERYTHING I need! :)

Mark
 
Hi Mark-

I'm a Mac user and finding myself needing Windows applications for working remotely - outlook, blackberry stuff, excel, powerpoint, etc.

How do you use parallels most? If I get a MBP I think I will likely run windows on it most of the time and keep "mac stuff" (music, adobe suite, etc.) in the mac os.

Does this sound feasible? Can you open a parallels window in windows as well as the mac os? Can you drag stuff from the paralells window out to the other OS? If not, how do you get them tyo work together?

Thanks for any thoughts!

-Rob
 
Well I just found my first problem which I'll post in another thread. :( Serves me right for posting. :)

Anyway, I use it pretty much like you said. I have Office loaded in both the MacOS and XP and use them both. I use Entourage for email just because my company is standardized on Exchange and while I'm used to it now, I still haven't decided if I like it better than Outlook. And I still have to use Outlook for some things, such as scheduling conference rooms in the public folders. Entourage doesn't support the security there for some reason.

I tend to use Excel in XP because it just works more efficiently. Things like data entry to cells, keyboard shortcuts for inserting columns and rows, and other little things just make Excel XP work better for me. Not to mention, I have a few Excel plugins that are .Net apps.

I use Word in MacOS becaus I like the layout better and it's just "nicer". If Excel was as easy to use on the Mac side I'd probably use it there too for the same reason.

Other things I use on the XP side are MS Project and Visio, and a couple of .Net web-services apps, as well as UltraEdit - best text editor out there.

I'm trying to use Eclipse on the Mac side, but having trouble with one of my required plugins.

And the Mac-specific apps are fantastic. I'm glad I switched and it actually works well for me as a primarily business-only user. (But the geek in me is starting to play with the power-user stuff, and I can't help doing some development on my own)

Mark
 
BTW you mentioned remotely - we have a Cisco VPN and it works perfectly in Parallels, no issues at all. I'm not a blackberry user any more (got rid of it two months ago and don't miss it), so I can't speak to that one.

You want cool? I'm playing with the Google calender now, pushing iCal formats to my normal cell phone and using an open source app to get the iCal stuff down to Outlook. Gives me my calender everywhere. Now if I can get it to push directly up to Exchange I'll have it in Entourage too.

Mark
 
Thanks Mark. Do you generally run a window with Windows or Mac? Like I said, I think I will end up running windows directly most of the time. It would be great to be able to run a Mac window within it and be able to get files from one os to the other easily (without having to upload, email myself, etc.)...

Thanks again!
 
Actually I use Virtue Desktop and have a "Windows" desktop where I run Parallels full screen, for several reasons. First, Virtue is cool. :) Second, Parallels has a habit of chopping certain application windows in two when toggling back from full screen, Safari, Preview and some others. Yes it's a bug that hasn't been addressed yet, not a real problem but annoying. But when I run it full screen on another desktop and then toggle over, it doesn't happen. Weird.

I use the Parallels shared folders sometimes to move files back and forth, but it's a little slow. I've also heard there are occasional problems with it, but it hasn't happened to me. Most of the time I just use my home directory on the server and Windows Offline files to keep things synced locally. The Mac side can get to the server directories much more quickly than the XP side can get to shared folders. Not to mention, our servers are backed up every night.

There's another suggestion here for basically networking the Mac OS directly to XP via Samba, basically bypassing shared folders completely. I've started to do that but it does require a router on the network and just didn't make sense for me.

Mark
 
lithe951 said:
Actually I use Virtue Desktop and have a "Windows" desktop where I run Parallels full screen, for several reasons. First, Virtue is cool. :) Second, Parallels has a habit of chopping certain application windows in two when toggling back from full screen, Safari, Preview and some others. Yes it's a bug that hasn't been addressed yet, not a real problem but annoying. But when I run it full screen on another desktop and then toggle over, it doesn't happen. Weird.
Click to expand...
In the Parallels preferences, under User Interface, make sure that "Allow to change Mac OS X screen resolution" is unchecked. I believe that will solve the problem you describe above. The windows are "being chopped" when Parallels changes the Mac's screen resolution to match that of the guest.
 
Nope. My guest OS resolution is identical to the Mac and I've tried that. If it was a matching issue then I would be changing the res to something silly like 640x480 because that's how small the windows end up. I'm running a 15" MBP at 1440x900 in both MacOS and XP. XP is the same resolution whether in a window or full screen.

I use apple-tab to toggle between applications, a habit from my Windows days. When I run Parallels on the same desktop as my other apps, this chopping occurs. If I run it on another virtue desktop it doesn't. Like I said, weird. And I'm sure there's a bug here somewhere.

Mark
 
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