Parallels Desktop products and compatibilty

[EmmanueleT]

Hi,

I am going to buy Parallels Desktop but from the specs and videos I did not get the difference between two products (desktop8 and destop switch to mac).

Can someone explain the main differences of the two products?

Secondly, both of the mentioned products fully interact with the graphics card (NVIDIA) of a macbook retina? Anyone experienced some limitation from a graphic point of view or noticed that parallels compatibility is not always achieved?

Lastly, I read that many people use visual studio in parallels and report no problems. Is parallels really so powerfull that new drivers / custom dlls / custom exe / external device like joystick are fully integrated with a 100% of compatibility?

I know these are many questions.

Thanks in advance for any clarification.

Sincerely

ET

 

[Eugene@Parallels]

Hello,

Thanks for your questions.

1) The difference between Parallels switch to Mac and the regular standard is that with Parallels Desktop switch to Mac you have a special Parallels USB cable, which is used for migrating user's PC to the virtual machine on the Mac side. Cable is designed for high speed and provide more convenient way to transfer PC to Mac's virtual machine.

2) Parallels Desktop is virtualizing existing host video adapter to the Guest OS environment and started from 8th version, it's supporting Retina. Basically there is no any limitation for video since its virtualized.


3) Talking about visual studio and other guest applications and environments - all these things should work in the virtual machine the same way as on the regular PC. If there is an issue with particular application/feature which works fine on the PC side but not in the virtual machine - we always deeply investigating it. So the summary here: everything should work like it is a standard PC, but inside your Mac.

You may try Trial version of Parallels Desktop 8 and see how it is working: http://www.parallels.com/trialdownload/pd8