IT Bytes

Updated to v3 today with the promise of DirectX support. Hmm, not very impressed. To be honest I think I should have stayed with previous version. I enabled DirectX but Vista carried on running it its non DirectX mode, I guess that cause it wants a DirectX 10 card rather than 8 that Parallels support. I used to be able to run Majong but now it crashes. Also the full screen mode seems blurry although to be fair when I went via the menu it was fine.

[Edit] – I think I’ve sussed the blurry full screen. When you go full screen it seems to preserve the resolution you have in the window mode. Therefore you have to manually adjust the screen resolution to the correct maximum size…I’m sure the old one handled this automatically

Convergence v2 didn’t seem all that different either, although you can now launch applications from the other OS, e.g. open a Word Doc on the Mac and it launch Office in Vista…or something. I don’t use that.

The Transport feature looks interesting, it seems that it can create Parallel machines from physical or other VM applications. I may have to try that.

The Explorer is quite nice too, it allows you to examine a disk without running a Parallel machine. Quite nice if you’re trying to conserve battery but need a file.

Still I think I’d rather have kept my money, but maybe they’ll be some patches soon.

[Edit] IE7 now crashes a lot, I’m not sure why this is, possibly a security changes, maybe DirectX related…it is very annoying.
[Edit] Ah it looks like it is DirectX related (maybe something to do with Flash adverts?), if I turn DirectX off the sites work fine, on they crash IE. Also there is a entry in Event log that looks very much like a DirectX related DLL. However, the copy from Event Log now crashes so I haven’t copied the text!