Windows Vista Running in Parallels Desktop
Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Sunday, February 18th, 2007.
Last night, while playing World of Warcraft, I installed the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Windows Vista Ultimate. Since I am a Mac “fanboy” now, I installed Vista on my MacBook using Parallels Desktop for Mac. Running the latest and greatest offering in the Windows realm on a virtual machine (VM) may seem crazy, but let me tell you, it runs great!
In order to install Vista in a VM on my Mac, I had to first install Windows XP because the version I have of Vista Ultimate is an upgrade version. The Vista installer has to be run from within the operating system you are upgrading. No more booting to the upgrade CD, showing it a full version CD and giving it a product key. Now it has to be installed from within the OS you’re upgrading. Oh, well. I installed another licensed version of Windows XP into a VM and as soon as the install was completed, popped the Vista DVD in and was on my way.
When installing Vista, make sure you have at least 16GB of disk space available for the OS to install itself and some room left over for installing applications and patches/updates. It is pretty beefy, but overall the install went very smoothly. I was impressed that the OS installed so painlessly in Parallels. Nice!
So, now to do some testing. I have little experience with Vista at this point and since it is the latest and greatest from Microsoft, I figure I should become familiar with it. You never know, Windows XP could be EOL‘d tomorrow and everyone would be forced to move to Vista or never receive another update for their OS. It has happened before, it could happen tomorrow, I’m just saying…
Again, while my experience with Vista is limited, I can tell you this about running Vista in a VM with Parallels: No Fancy 3D Eye Candy. All of the really nifty, 3D, Mac-like features Vista includes require DirectX 9.0 or greater. Either Parallels doesn’t have support for it or the video card in my MacBook can’t get down like that. Either way, the OS looks great and I am only missing eye candy, which I already get plenty of from my Mac. Everything else appears to work flawlessly.
Until next time…