Just as Time Machine was beginning to grow on me as a viable backup option I ran into my first annoyance. And it is annoying. Until now Time Machine ran almost unnoticed by me. But tonight I had a Parallels VM open for several hours. The good news is that Time Machine didn’t seem to be bothered by this. But then I shut down the VM and Time Machine’s hourly backup time rolled around. Time Machine had 12.9GB to back up, almost all of it was that VM. I was [...] Read the rest »
Leopard Upgrade: Parallels VMs Restored
Due to the time and hassle of rebuilding my Parallels Desktop(aff) VMs I wanted to use the VMs I had already created. This was simple to accomplish. I didn’t do anything special to prepare but all my VMs were shut down the last time I used them, not just suspended. I also didn’t have any snapshots to be saved. I did a complete erase and fresh install of Leopard. I’d cloned my disk so I’d be using the clone as a backup to restore from. After installing Leopard I installed [...] Read the rest »
The First Real Problems
I’ve finally encountered my first real upgrade problems. I installed Windows XP Pro SP2 under Boot Camp. Then I installed Parallels 3 and told it to use my Boot Camp partition for a virtual machine. Then the problems began. Parallels hangs up when starting the VM and Boot Camp no longer boots because it looks for the non-existent Parallels HAL. When I boot the VM under Parallels in safe-mode it hangs up after the mup.sys. It appears the next driver – NDIS.SYS – is the problem. It’s not an original [...] Read the rest »
Ready For OS X 10.5 Leopard?
[Last updated: Nov. 1st] [Oct. 29th: Now includes a sentence about my experience when using the app. Keep in mind I did fresh installs of everything and restored data.] It’s time to start going through my apps and seeing which are ready for OS X 10.5 Leopard and which aren’t. I’ll start with my most used and favorite apps. I’ll start with the assumption that the Apple apps in iLife ’08 and iWork ’08 along with Aperture 1.5 will work with Leopard either in their current form or with updates [...] Read the rest »
10 Favorite Macs Apps (that I don’t use enough)
Yesterday I wrote about my 10 Most Used Mac Apps according to Wakoopa. I was a little surprised by some of the apps that showed up on the list and a few apps I really like didn’t show up in the top 10. So these are the apps I wished were on, or expected to show up in, the top 10 list. In reverse order this time. 10. Quicken for Mac (aff) – I wouldn’t call this a favorite. It came with my first Mini so I used it. I [...] Read the rest »
Parallels 3 Build 5160
Parallels released a minor upgrade to Parallels 3 Desktop for Mac (aff). It’s a free update to Parallels 3 owners and is an 88MB download. It’s available through the built-in Parallels software update feature or as a direct download. Parallels 3 Upgrade Checklist Download the update and run the installer (which is an automatic prompt through their software update). Start each of your VMs. When you start a VM for the first time after the upgrade the Parallels Tools Setup will run so you can update Parallels Tools. The file [...] Read the rest »
Parallels 3 Upgrade Checklist
I finally got around to updating my Parallels 2.5 installation to the latest Parallels 3. Parallels 3 has been out awhile and I’ll be installing build 4560. I’ll be upgrading Parallels on my iMac and have 5 virtual machines configured. I don’t have Boot Camp installed on my iMac. I checked to see if there was an update to Parallels 2.5. There was an update available for download but I was on the recently released build 3212. I didn’t see any mention of needing the newer version to do the [...] Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #3
Upgrades – Patches – Please Stop the Madness It seems like all I did this past week was patch and upgrade. I already mentioned the iWeb ’08 update. Microsoft released 9 security updates so it took awhile to patch my VMs. Apple also updated Boot Camp to version 1.4 and I got around to updating it this week. VMWare Fusion also moved out of beta recently. I’d been running the beta version on my MacBook and finally got around to upgrading it to the final release. I haven’t upgraded to [...] Read the rest »
Parallels Out of Compliance with LPGL?
http://wiki.winehq.org/Parallels SWSoft doesn’t keep it a secret that they use the Wine libraries in Parallels 3.0. The Wine developers have put up a Wiki page documenting what they say is their failed attempts to get the source code from SWSoft. There’s also a short thread in the Parallels support forum. The Wine developer’s seem to be frustrated that SWSoft has promised the code but missed their own target dates although I’m thinking 22 days isn’t too long since lawyers are involved. Read the rest »
Microsoft’s Virtualization Flip-Flop
http://news.com.com/Mystery+surrounds+Microsofts+virtualization+flip-flop/2100-1016_3-6192220.html CNet News has a good analysis of Microsoft’s last minute decision not to expand their license to allow running the lower priced versions of Vista. Microsoft has claimed this is for security reasons since virtualization introduces security risk. Those security risks exist for all Vista versions and in fact for any OS. My favorite part is a quote from Paul DeGroot, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft: If you want to make your product more secure, then make your product more secure. when talking about the license agreement (which [...] Read the rest »