Parallels Workstation Beta5 now available

javester · 11:03 AM

Just one week after releasing Beta4, Parallels releases Beta5 with the following features:

Introduced USB support. Connect your favorite USB devices directly to a virtual machine!
Introduced shared folders. Share files between Mac OS X and any Windows XP or Windows 2003 guest virtual machine!
Support for dynamic screen resolutions. When a guest OS is selected, a list of available screen resolutions is dynamically populated with primary OS resolutions.
Fixed keyboard mapping problems
Fixed mouse pointer lag problem
Better sound support
Fixed problems with sleeping/waking up the primary OS when a VM is running
Introduced the ability to resize a guest when switching to fullscreen mode
Added optional "transition cube" animation for transitioning to and from fullscreen mode
Fixed several kernel panics
Added default network adapter for bridged mode
Sound lag fixed

javester · 03:05 PM

The Parallels site is suffering a major slowdown, apparently, coz of the Beta5 announcement. Even the support forum has been taken down for maintenance. We will mirror info here in the meantime.

Some more Beta5 info:

Coupled with Virtue Desktop Manager, Beta5 now allows users to transparently switch between OS X and Parallels.
Shared Folders only work with Windows XP.
It is not possible to create subfolders in Shared Folder from inside guest OS.
It is not possible to clear “read-only” attribute for the file in a Shared Folder from inside guest OS.

javester · **Additional info and Movie of Fullscreen switching -** 04-26-2006, 12:18 PM

Folks,

Here are some more juicy tidbits:

Updated Parallels Tools. It incorporates new video, mouse, network and USB drivers.
To enable USB support in VMs created in earlier Betas, be sure to STOP an existing VM (not suspend) and add "USB Controller" in the VM's configuration.
Full-screen switching, coupled with Virtue Desktop Manager is amazing! See it for yourself! Just click on the picture on the right...

javester · **Parallels Full Screen Switching is awesome! -** 04-26-2006, 03:47 PM

After quickly putting Beta5 through its paces, we're just amazed at how fast Parallels has integrated full-screen support into the latest build.

They even managed to integrate cool transition effects, even without Virtue, to have a more transparent cross-platform experience.

Just check out the movies below! The first movie shows Parallels starting XP fullscreen. The second one shows Parallels resuming a suspended XP fullscreen session.

Note how fast Parallels is. Its even faster than Windows XP's "resume from hibernate" when using it's own resume feature!