Annoying problem with Parallels v3.0

See this discussion forum on the Parallels website.

I have Office 2004 for the Mac installed (on the Mac side of my world). I also have Excel installed on my Parallels/Windows virtual machine. What is happening is I click on a file with a .XLS extension (on the Mac side) and Parallels wants to start Excel on the Windows virtual machine.

My Mac is already ghetto

See the screen comparison (between old/recent and new) in this ComputerWorld article...

I upgraded to Parallels v3.0

I don't have an immediate need for v3.0, but it does provide better/compatible graphics support for some software.

Ensure you stop/quit your virtual machine before upgrading Parallels. A friend told me that having the virtual machine in a suspended state may result in some nasty side affects after one upgrades the core Parallels software.

Tidbit. Parallels v2.0 has build numbers in the 3xxx range, and Parallels v3.0 has build numbers in the 4xxx range. A tad misleading for the user.

Sharing files (or not) between Mac and Parallels/Windows

Parallels provides the option for you to share/access files between the Mac and the virtual Windows machine. I have the option disabled since I want a level of isolation between the two machines. I don't want a virus or rogue script to be able to destroy data files on both sides of the "fence".

How to force background maintenance tasks

See this Apple article on how to force background maintenance tasks.

In a nutshell, you might periodically run these three commands from a Terminal window:

1. sudo sh /etc/daily
   
2. sudo sh /etc/weekly
   
3. sudo sh /etc/monthly
   

Keeping your Mac secure

See this InformationWeek article on OS X and security.

I use Parallels to provide the virtual machine for Windows XP on my Mac laptop, and therefore I am also running an anti-virus program (McAfee) on the WinXP OS.

Mac vs Windows cost analysis

See this ComputerWorld article.

My experiences were similar. Go online and config/price a Macbook Pro laptop and a HP or Dell laptop with similar specs. You might be pleasantly surprised.

One fellow's thoughts on forthcoming OS

Read here. It's an interesting hypothesis that the forthcoming Leopard OS would natively run Windows applications (ie., no need for Parallels).

Next version of Parallels

The website TechCrunch has a review of the upcoming release (version 3.0) of Parallels.