Parallels Desktop

Now that I’ve got the external storage working I’ve started on getting Parallels Desktop running. It’s a software package which does virtualization of just about any x86 based operating system, including my choice: Windows XP.

Installing Parallels, like all of the other Mac apps that I’ve installed is completely painless. Configuring it on the other hand has been a little bit of work. It’s not that it’s difficult to get through the configuration screens, just that there’s so much you’ve got to keep in mind when virtualizing a computer that I’m catching mistakes. The good thing is that I just reformat the virtual drive and start over.

I haven’t yet run in to any performance issues with keeping the hard drive images on the external drive. I’m just having a little trouble with getting the Student Edition of XP that I bought last year to register, but that’s because I’ve had to reinstall it a couple times on the real PC so it looks like a call to Microsoft is in order…