Parallels Desktop® 7 for Mac
Reviews & Awards
Parallels Desktop for Mac — Most Tested, Trusted and Talked About!
Parallels Desktop is consistently ranked as the world’s #1 virtualization solution – with a long history of winning the hearts and minds of both customers and reviewers. See what others have to say.
Parallels Desktop for Mac takes this important award for the second time in a row!
I started using Parallels 7 to run virtual machine labs to practice my security assessment skills. I’ve read a ton of reviews comparing Parallels 7 to VMWare Fusion 4, but I wanted to try testing the two myself. I’ll save you the time and energy of this article and let you know now that Parallels Desktop 7 smoked VMWare Fusion 4.
With the release of Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac and shortly thereafter, VMware Fusion 4, the question has been how well do these programs perform? One of the leading Apple technology publications, MacTech expended a significant amount of time and resources on an exhaustive series of benchmark comparison tests to determine the leader in desktop virtualization.
It's been possible to run Microsoft Windows on Intel-based Macs for several years now, albeit with varying degrees of ease and performance. In my experience, the most convenient way is through third-party software called Parallels, which has just launched a fresh and improved version that seamlessly works with Apple's OS X Lion operating system.
A huge thank you to all of the MacUser readers and industry experts who chose Parallels Desktop as the MacUser Awards “Best Business Software of 2011.” We are incredibly humbled to be featured in a category with such notable products as Office for Mac 2011, Dragon Dictate and 1Password.
The response from critics and users surrounding Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac has truly been nothing short of incredible. Recently, Ars Technica conducted a series of in-depth comparison tests between Parallels Desktop 7 and VMware Fusion 4 to determine “who’s the baddest, and who’s just bad.”
PJ Connolly’s eWeek review of Parallels Desktop 7 was just published and it's very positive. The review delves into remote capabilities, declaring that “Parallels Mobile client is far ahead of anything that VMware offers for mobile devices,” and, “The Parallels Mobile app is a great convenience for road warriors who want to travel with a minimum of hardware.”
Connolly also provides a positive overview of PD7 Enterprise Edition, noting that it works with various remote management tools and that “It’s an easily configured way to ensure that a deployment of scores or hundreds of installations is done consistently from one machine to the next.”
The review discusses other new features such as Lion support, the Parallels Wizard and the ability to purchase Windows 7 from within the product. Connolly concludes that “Parallels has an edge in mass deployment scenarios. As frosting on the cupcake, the Parallels Mobile client is far ahead of anything that VMware offers for mobile devices. Advantage: Parallels.
Parallels Desktop 7, the latest version of Parallels Inc.'s Windows-in-a-Mac software, successfully navigated my little torture test with nary a hiccup. There's no better solution for Mac users who want Windows compatibility… To try out Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac, I used a year-old 11-inch MacBook Air with a now two-generations-old Intel Core 2 Duo processor, four gigabytes of memory and 128 gigabytes of storage. I had previously installed Windows and Office, using Boot Camp to run them when needed…. The software proved to be both low-overhead and low- maintenance. It took up less than a gigabyte of my constrained storage capacity and speedily launched Microsoft programs in Coherence mode from a drop-down Windows start menu accessed via a Parallels icon on the Mac's top bar. All my custom macros for Microsoft Word worked without a hitch. I was also able to easily run the special software used for accessing the Bloomberg Professional Service.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO of Rich Jaroslovsky’s Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac review.
In my tests, this latest Parallels edition ran Windows quickly and smoothly, and integrated well with some of Lion's new features, even though my test Mac isn't the fastest Apple laptop available today…. All Windows 7 programs I tested launched and ran quickly and smoothly, and the fancy visual effects in Windows 7, such as mini-previews for icons in the taskbar, worked great…. And now, it will even allow you to buy, download and install Windows right from within Parallels. Previously, you had to obtain Windows separately. This is a big improvement, in my view…. Parallels 7 can create and run multiple virtual machines, and also handle operating systems other than Windows. For instance, I was able to run Linux and an open-source version of Google's Chrome OS on my Mac using Parallels. At one point in my tests, I had four operating systems running at once, and could control all four from an iPad.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO.
There are a lot of new features in Parallels Desktop 7, and the folks at Parallels gave me a first-hand demonstration of many of them. The speed of the new Parallels version running Windows 7 in a virtual machine was impressive, as Windows programs running on the Mac desktop (Coherence mode) were as fast as native Mac programs. It is now possible to share the Mac web cam with Windows, and I witnessed a demo of both Facetime and a Windows program both using the web cam at the same time. You can also install multiple versions of OS X using Parallels for software testing.
The folks over at Parallels have been hard at work on perfecting the software for OS X Lion, and now it's ready. Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac will go on sale on September 6th, bringing a bunch of Lion features to apps that you're running in Windows. Expect the ability to use Lion features like Full Screen, LaunchPad, and Mission Control with Windows programs, along with the ability to run multiple copies of OS X Lion and Windows at the same time. On the performance end of things, Parallels Desktop 7 is 60 percent faster than the previous version for resuming Windows, and 45 percent faster for 3D graphics. ALso new is improved 5.1 surround sound, and support for 7.1 surround as well.
Parallels 7 has just been announced. The latest iteration of Parallels, the virtualization environment that currently has about 75% of the total market share for VM software, ships with more than 90 new and enhanced features.
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