12.26.06
Parallels Beta Build 3094
I know this is a little old but I finally got around to installing the new version of the Parallels Beta. It’s actually quite nifty. Coherence mode has been improved, and the ability to see windows apps from the dock has to be seen to be believed. You can hide almost every aspect of windows with the settings for coherence, it makes running windows apps very unobtrusive. They look like crap but it’s windows, what do you expect?
I tried out the USB 2.0 support and it works very well. I am able to plug my jumpdrive (formatted ntfs) and mount and copy files from it at the faster speeds in my Windows XP guest host. The update was flawless, although booting safemode in Parallels seems to be a trickier operation than in the VMware products, due to the flip animation it uses to switch from the configuration screen to the guest os console. There is a setting for this on the menu bar. Go to Parallels Desktop->Preferences and click the Animation tab. The setting there for OS Window transition allows you to disable this annoying animation and helps with that tricky F8 action to boot into safemode.
I’m very impressed with this software, for beta, it’s very well executed. I haven’t experienced any problems at all with either beta build, but the features in this new one are WELL worth the time and effort it takes to upgrade your current version. If you decide to upgrade be very sure you boot safemode in Windows and install the new version of Parallels Tools. You should do that on the first boot under the new version of the beta.