…To MacBook

I saw that Snow Leopard was only going to be $29 and I was so ready to jump on that bandwagon until the day they released it. Rumors went around that Parallels 3.0 does not work on Snow Leopard. This doesn’t work for me because I have a windows XP drive set up with parallels 3.0 which I use when some clients require me to use Windows or to test web pages on IE. Some people recommended I use a different VM but I spent a long time just setting up the windows on parallels that I don’t want to do that all over again.

Just when I quit on the idea of upgrading to snow leaopard, I found this site that has a large list of application compatibility with Snow Leopard:

http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/o-t

That’s where I found out that Parallels 4.0 works with Snow Leopard, so I decided to upgrade. I just spent $56.98 to upgrade to 4.0.

Installation is pretty straight forward. I downloaded a .dmg file from Parallels, double click on the file and you get a window that has the installation package. Just double click the installation package and follow the instructions. I just went with all the defaults without changing anything.

Before starting parallels 4.0 up, remember to first back up your windows installation just in case something goes horribly wrong. I’m using time machine and will be forcing it to do a backup right before I start it up. If you don’t have time machine set up then you could just as easily go to where you installed your windows VM and you should find two files. The first is a .pvs file, should be a small file that just has the VM configuration (mine is called “Microsoft Windows XP PRO.pvs”). The second file is the actual virtual hard drive (yeah I said actual virtual!) with a .hdd extension (mine is called winxp.hdd). You can also save the .fdd file (the floppy drive) but I don’t think that’s necessary but why not just back that up as well.

After installation, I ran the windows vm configuration by double clicking on it. I got a prompt that asked me to upgrade the VM to the new version with a warning to back up before doing so. Because we’ve already backed everything up, I just went ahead with the upgrade process. After a few minutes, parallels 4 started normally. The only problem I’ve been having is an issue with the floppy drive not being recognized which I don’t really care about because I don’t use it, everything else is working.

I just noticed that Apple has updated their line of macbooks. From what I could tell the changes are:

• Processor speeds have been updated. The difference is actually a small bump up for the higher end macbooks (from 2.0 to 2.16).
• Hard drive capacities are higher.
• Superdrive has been upgraded to 8 speed instead of 6.

These updates are nothing to write home about and I’m not rushing off to get an updated version (not that I was going to even if the upgrades were significant). What I would like to see in next generations that would make me think of upgrading are:

• backlit keyborad. I’d like this a lot because then I won’t need to depend on the monitor illuminating the keyboard, especially when I’m using the terminal.
• LED monitor.
• more RAM capacity. When I got the macbook I thought I’d be fine with just 1 gig. I was wrong. I’m not using 2 gigs on this machine and although I’m fine running 2 gigs, I’m right on the edge. I would like to see 3 gig models or more.