Parallels Desktop Review

I have had a iMac for a few months now and I love it. I moved over from a Windows XP PC with no problems, apart from one. I needed to access my work PC remotely using RDP, but I could not get it to work, when I worked for a previous company it worked fine without any problems, but after doing some research and contacting the people in-charge of our network I found out that they do not allow Macs to RDP on our network. The solution to this problem was to use a Windows VM (virtual machine) on the Mac.

I bought my iMac with a copy of Parallels Desktop because I thought I might need it and I had some software that would only run in Windows. I installed a copy of Windows XP and could RDP to my work PC without any problems. I found it really easy to setup and run, and it runs so much faster than my previous PC, this is partly thanks to the iMacs higher spec, but I run a Windows XP VM on my Windows 7 work PC which has a similar spec and it is over 10 times slower (Sophos could be the cause).

Here is a list of features I really like (Pros)

• Quick to start up and shutdown (seconds not minutes)
• Coherence allows you to run Windows applications in the Mac desktop, I generally do not use this, but it is a nice feature.
• Windows icon in Mac dock which lists Windows applications to run, basically the Windows Start menu program list.
• Multiple VMs.
• Specify the number of CPUs and amount of memory to use (RAM), I have it set to a single CPU and 1GB of memory.
• Loads of settings which I need to explore further.

Usually when I review something I put the Pros and Cons, with this software I have not found any at the moment. This is a great piece of software and makes the jump from Windows to iOS a lot easier and more gradual. You can have all the software you are use to on the virtual machine and as you get more comfortable with iOS, gradual move over.