Brief Hands-On Report--Parallels Posted New Release Candidate for its Desktop for Mac v2.2

Parallels posted a new release candidate (RC) Build 1898 of its Desktop for Mac v2.2 and it is available for download from this Parallels Web page. It has lots of improvements, according to MacUpdate.com:

• Video output improvement and acceleration
  
• Added multi interfaces USB devices support (including Windows Mobile 2005 devices)
  
• Added isochronous USB devices support (including WebCam devices)
  
• Minor USB fixes
  
• Keyboard support improvement: Eject CD key support, left/right
• Shift/Ctrl/Alt (Option)/Windows keys difference support
  
• Added virtual disk cache policy option: Mac OS X performance optimized or guest OS performance optimized
  
• Image Tool fixes
  
• Optimized disk cache policy for Suspend/Resume feature
  
• Windows ME Suspend/Resume fix
  
• Shared Folders first time access acceleration
  
• Clipboard synchronization tool fixes (unreadable symbols sometimes added during copy and paste)
  
• Sound playback improvement
  
• Sound recording improvement
  
• Minor Full Screen mode fixes
  
• "Unable to allocate virtual memory" during virtual machine power on fix
  
• Solaris doesn't work with more than one virtual disk fix
  
• Minor GUI fixes and improvements

We downloaded Build 1898 and installed it over our copy of Build 1862.2 with no problems. This was not the case of the previously released Build 1894, as we noted, that would not install over our copy of Build 1862.2. Our Windows XP virtual machine launched and ran fine. We updated it with the latest Microsoft security updates, updated Firefox and Thunderbird to v1.5.0.7, did some Web browsing and checked email, all without running into any problems. [Bill Fox]