Parallels Desktop for Mac, beta2

Posted December 21st, 2006 by mike

Intel

Parallels has released beta 2 of Parallels Desktop for Mac, with several enhancements and fixes.

Among the hilights of this release:

USB 2.0 support! Work with critical USB 2.0 devices like external hard drive, printers, and scanners at full native speeds. Just plug and play! A heads up; "isynchronous" devices like Bluetooth devices, webcams, etc. do not work with USB 2.0 yet, but they're working hard to get them up and running.
Full-feature virtual CD/DVD drive. Burn CDs and DVDs directly in virtual machines, and play any copy-protected CD or DVD just like you would on a real PC.
Improved Coherence mode. The groundbreaking feature that lets you run Windows applications without seeing Windows is now even more usable. Starting today, you can:
- Place Windows applications on your Mac desktop or in your application dock. Just click to launch them directly from OS X!
- Use Command+tab to cycle through Windows and Mac applications simultaneously, and "hide and show" Windows applications just like you would with Mac applications
- Use Coherence in both Windows XP and Windows Vista!
Better support for using Boot Camp partitions in Parallels Desktop.
Full support for both FAT32 and NTFS partitions
Easy offline configuration; simply tell Parallels Desktop that you want to create a virtual machine from a Boot Camp partition and click "start". No complicated set up required.
No need to re-activate Windows each time you switch between Boot Camp and Parallels. Activate Windows only once and work in both environments.
Use Parallels Transporter to make VMWare Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC images work Parallels Desktop. Use Parallels Transporter, our free tool that helps users move an entire real PC to a virtual machine, to make an existing VMWare Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machine compatible with Parallels Desktop for Mac. Whether you're moving a real PC or a VMWare or Microsoft virtual machine to Parallels Desktop, you won't lose a single byte of data or re-installing a single application.