OMG Can u play Wow wit tisÑ— cuz I ned fps ta git phat epix. kthxbai

The sweetest part about it is being able to run IE near full screen. Having the IE window behave like any Mac window will probably increase my web development productivity 50%. I can have Safari and IE and Firefox side by side and compare how my pages get rendered without doing all sorts of window gymnastics.

Another very sweet feature of the new Parallels is importing VMs from Virtual PC. I had some software stranded in a Virtual PC VM because of the software's funky licensing scheme, and can now run it full speed on an Intel Mac. Only issue is Windows' activation, but I'll try activating with the Windows license that accompanied Virtual PC and again with one I purchased for use with Parallels.

I hope Mac users aren't holding out for Apple to do this stuff with Boot Camp. The $80 for Parallels is probably the best $80 you'll ever spend.

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Bosco wrote:
The sweetest part about it is being able to run IE near full screen.

but can it run wow? I ned moor fps ta do mc and bwl fer epix bc exp is heer but need fps for epix

Felixgardian, there's no need to write as if you are sending text messages or breathless mid-raid messages to your WoW clan buddies....

To answer your question, Parallels *might* run WoW decently once they get the 3-D support working. In the mean time you can:

1. Reboot into Windows using Boot Camp - you'll get a few more frames per second. Maybe.

2. Run it under CrossOver - probably won't run any better, but you never know.

3. Uh, run it under OS X with the latest patches from Blizzard? It runs great on a MacBook Pro, and if you're on a MacBook, GLfaster supposedly boosts it to about 50 FPS if you're looking at nothing (or as low as 2 FPS if you're looking at a million people.)

Seriously, you're not going to get *better* performance under a virtual machine monitor - if you want maximum performance for games, run 'em native - either natively on OS X or on Windows using Boot Camp.

The nice thing is that Parallels - if they get the 3-D support working - will allow you to run native Windows games at reduced performance, but without rebooting, which is very convenient.

The coherence mode is AMAZING. It's EXACTLY what I need to make windows useful, IE, I don't have to see windows just to use its apps. Also, there's a preference to switch the alt & windows keys on the PC side... so now all of my remembered mac shortcuts cmd+v cmd+p WORK correctly without having to switch my brain around. Last but not least, drag and drop functionality works AMAZINGLY. I can drag a file to windows, edit, then drag it back to the mac... windows even asks if I want to overwrite the original.

A few nice things... the dock icons of the open windows apps work pretty well, I've yet to try dragging and dropping a file on one, or trying out contextual menus on them yet. Also, the auto screen resizing is super rad. I just drag the window to the size I want, and windows scales itself to fit. No scroll bars. Plus, the full screen mode works like fast user switching, a cube flip to the windows box.

Man, any other company that wants to do Windows on Mac, is going to have a long way to catch up, at least for non FPS, WOW kind of stuff. Since I don't play games I have no idea if any games actually run well on it, but non-game apps run just like I'd expect them to.

So it's just like Classic mode? Cool.

I just have one question. They say each OS will run on its own core on dual-core machines. What exactly does this mean? OS X naturally makes use of both cores itself. Does this mean that Parallels will somehow hog one core all to itself, robbing it from OS X, or that Windows (within Parallels) will have access to only one core while the rest of OS X can still use both?

Parallels takes one, OSX takes one.

Oh, and I checked... there is support for some dock icon functionality. For instance, the parallels firefox icon & notepad icons display open window names in the dock icon.

Does the beta 3 offer this yet? I really want to be able to do Yahoo videochat in the same way I can do iChat videochat. Yahoo offers it in the Windows version of Yahoo Messenger, but not in the Macintosh version.

Not according to the forums. Haven't actually tried it on my MBP though.