Run a Windows application on your Mac

I decided to try out a product called Parallels the other day. I did this because I love my Macs, but I also love Quicken for Windows. I had heard about Parallels from a number of places, but figured now was the time to give it a try.

After installing it and installing Windows XP as a guest VM, I got to really see what was so special about this product.

The feature of Parallels that I really liked is called Coherence. With the Coherence feature enabled, it becomes very seamless when running a Windows application on your host OSX operating system. You no longer have to "swap" between the two operating systems. You can now have the Windows shell natively embedded into your OSX environment. For a peek at what this looks like, check out the image below.



It is really a powerful, clean way to implement better usability of the guest environment. You can even go farther with cross-launching applications between the two environments, but that just isn't something I'm all that interested in. My goal is to use Quicken for Windows on my Mac and this Parallels is a great way to do it!

The drawback... Have plenty of physical memory. The Mac Mini that I was running this on has 1G of memory and that was just not quite enough for a pleasurable VM experience. Swapping back and forth between the guest environment and the host environment was very noticeable and almost unusable. I'm very familiar with VM technology, both at home and at work, so I'm confident that this was not a problem with Parallels. It just takes more then 512M of memory for each operating system (the guest and the host) to run smoothly, and any VM product has to deal with this.