Brief Hands-On Report--Parallels Desktop for Mac 2.5 Build 3150

Parallels released a new build of Desktop for Mac 2.5 as its second release candidate. It is available for download via MacUpdate.com.

We bought Parallels Desktop for Mac at a steep discount right after it completed the beta testing program for the first release and have kept it updated since, including switching to the beta program for the very much improved version 2.5. Build 3150 replaces Build 3120 released early last month at Macworld. The features of version 2.5 are:

• USB 2.0 support - Plug and play popular USB devices like external hard drives, printers, scanners and web cameras including iSight at full native speed.
  
• 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
  
• Coherence - The ground-breaking feature that lets you run Windows applications without seeing Windows just got better!
  
• Better Boot Camp support

The coherence mode is truly awesome. The Windows desktop is removed and Windows applications appear to be running on Mac OS X.

Build 3150 downloaded fine and we used the Uninstaller to remove Build 3120 rather than updating it. After installing Build 3150, we updated Parallels Tools for our two virtual machines, Windows XP Pro SP2 and Windows Vista Ultimate RC1. The updating went without a hitch and both virtual machines run fine. We updated both with Microsoft's latest updates and tried several applications with no discernible problems. [Bill Fox]