XP Service Packs and Parallels Desktop 3 build 5584

Hi. I recently inherited a Macbook and some software for it. The specs are below. I am new to the Mac environment. Give me a warm welcome please. haha! Anyway I formatted the drive and installed OSX 10.4.11 and to the best of my knowledge I got all of the current updates it said were available. I just finished installing Parallels Desktop 3 build 5584 and I installed Windows XP Pro which I had. It came with Service Pack 1 integrated. I'm not sure why, but it took me two attempts to get Windows Service Pack 2installed. Where should I stop? Parallels Desktop 3 build 5584 does not support Service Pack 3 does it? Do I continue to get ALL updates prior to Service Pack 3? Am I correct in saying that Parallels Tools is automatically installed or do I have to install them? I am so new to this... Any tips you guys/gals can give me would be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much!


Macbook specs...

1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor
512MB (two 256MB SO-DIMMs) of DDR2 SDRAM
60GB 5400-rpm hard drive
13.3-inch (diagonal) TFT widescreen display; 1280 by 800 pixels
Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
Slot loading Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CDRW)

 

Firstly, the User Guide is your friend.

Secondly, Parallels loads the Parallels Tools cd image into the virtual machine when it's the first time you boot it with the OS installed and since auto run is normally default in XP it will pop the Parallels Tools installation once you are logged in, this cd image, Parallels Tools, is just a cd with drivers for video, sound, etc. So it installs like any other driver installer does, there's nothing 'magic' about it.

Thirdly, for SP3, and before you install SP3, you have to upgrade Parallels to build 5608, since you have a license to 5584, the upgrade is free, download it from the trial page (the installer is the same, trial or non trial).

Now the tricky part, it would've been simpler if you had used the latest version (5608) from the start, to safely upgrade you should uninstall 5584 first, which means you should also uninstall the Parallels Tools from the VM (via Add/Remove) and after installing 5608 on the Mac you should then install Parallels Tools (5608).

When you uninstall Parallels it doesn't delete your VMs.

Edit: Consider upgrading your RAM, 512 MB to share between OSX and XP is barely enough, it will improve your performance greatly if you have at least 1 GB (512 to each OS). And RAM is cheap anyway.