Parallels 4.0 for Snow Leopard – It can play games now!
So I recently upgraded to the new Snow Leopard OS 10.6 and I have to say that I really like it. I think it’s great, and a lot faster than Leopard. The only complaint that I have is that some of may programs no longer work like Cyberduck, my FTP program. They just released a beta for Snow Leopard so this wasn’t that big of a deal.
However, when I tried to start up Parallels 3.0 I was informed that it would not run on Snow Leopard. Sadly there is not way to upgrade to a version of 3.0 that will work on Snow Leopard, probably because they had to rewrite the whole thing for Snow Leopard, and want you to pay for the new version.
Parallels 4.0 will work on Snow Leopard but they make you pay $40 to upgrade to the new version. I was kind of upset that I just bought a piece of software not that long ago and now they want me to purchase the new version just because they don’t want to fix the old one for free. Anyways that is neither here nor there.
The Good news is the new version of Parallels 4.0 is much better and allows you to play PC games on your virtual machine. I have wanted to play left 4 dead on my virtual machine for some time now, but there was not Direct X support in Parallels, which made this impossible. Parallels now supports up to direct X 9.0 and will play my left 4 dead game to my delight.
The cool thing about Parallels 4.0 is that you can get the demo if you need to access something from your virtual machine without paying for the full version, and it will automatically convert your old system into the new system for you. The conversion takes a couple of minutes but once your done your ready to go with the new Parallels 4.0 virtual machine. I was relieved to hear that I would not loose the old install of windows because I really didn’t feel like installing windows and all the programs again.
The new version seems to integrate much better and offers more support for up to 8GB of RAM and 8 CPUs. So if you have the power Parallels can handle it.