Fastest Mac Ever and Parallels

ByMike Moffit

By Matt@Smalldog.com

Yesterday I finally got my hands on a Mac Pro. It’s a dual 2.66 with two hard drives and 5GB of RAM and it is jaw-droppingly fast. I thought the G5 quad booted up quickly…try 12-15 seconds for the Mac Pro. It’s crazy!

The fastest Mac ever is a great machine to run Windows, too. I tried installing Parallels, the program that allows you to run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously. It’s like Virtual PC, but there’s no processor emulation, so it’s quite fast on the machines I’ve used. However, Parallels isn’t yet compatible with the Mac Pro: it is unable to find the SuperDrive. On my third try, there was a kernel panic.

A call to Parallels Tech Support department was returned within the hour, and an e-mail even sooner. It looks like we’ll have to wait a few weeks for an updated version.

Meanwhile, Boot Camp was updated to (beta) version 1.1 to support the Mac Pro, so go that route if dual-booting is what you’re after.

A word of advice to all Windows users on any hardware: remember you’re running Windows! Take security precautions to keep yourself safe, like religiously installing Microsoft security updates and keeping the latest virus definitions. Small Dog keeps Symantec AntiVirus for Windows in stock, and if you plan on running Windows, plan on buying AntiVirus or reinstalling Windows regularly! You can get it by clicking here.

By Matt@Smalldog.com

Similar Posts

  • Parallels 4 Preview

    Parallels Desktop 4.0 for the Mac was released at the beginning of this week. Parallels is the very popular virtualization software that allows…

  • The Safari 4 Beta Rules!

    Apple has released the fourth version of its Safari web browser as a public beta for both Macs and PCs. This impressive new…

  • Halloween Movie Vault for iPad

    Just in time for Halloween, check out the Halloween version of the Movie Vault app. It features over a 100 free feature length…

  • Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5

    We recently installed Adobe’s newly released “*Creative Suite 5*”:http://cs5.org/ on a few of our machines. One of the first features I was eager to try out was the new “Content Aware Fill” in Photoshop.

    This new feature allows you to make a quick selection within an image, delete it, and automatically fill in a randomized background based on the surrounding elements within the image.

    After tinkering with the new tool for a bit, I found that it worked best with natural organic images, such as the landscape scene featured in the video below. While it does not always do a perfect job, you can reselect pieces of the image after filling, and refill them to make the image more realistic.

    While this tool is not useful 100% of the time, when the situation and image permits, it can save a ton of time!

  • New iMacs (4/08)!

    UPDATE: iMacs now in stock! Just a couple of minutes ago, Apple announced new, updated and upgraded iMacs. With faster processor speeds, more…