#Buy parallels desktop boxed for mac trial#

Clicking it will bring up the familiar Windows start menu where you can fire off other applications. If you run in Coherence mode, you’ll find that your Windows Start Menu becomes an icon on your Mac dockbar. Parallels provides fantastic integration with the DockBar. I found I didn’t need to put the video card into ‘performance’ mode just to run Safari for instance. It also doesn’t seem to interfere with the normal operation of your mac quite as much either. Parallels seems to be faster with less configuring/tweaking than VirtualBox. You don’t need to any more than that to get started.

#Buy parallels desktop boxed for mac trial#

Download a trial from and double click the Installer icon that should autostart when it’s finished downloading.

Installing Parallels is extremely simple. Your Mac is the world and Parallels provides a greenhouse – or guest environment.

And so it is with computer virtualisation. They’re essentially completely separate environments, but the greenhouse cannot exist without the world. If it rains in the real environment it doesn’t necessarily do so in the greenhouse. They both have an environment, but the greenhouse is encapsulated within the main environment. The world is your computer, Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox are the greenhouse. You can think of computer virtualisation a little like a greenhouse in your back garden. It does this by kind of putting the other operating system (known as a guest operating system) inside it’s own virtual machine. Virtualisation enables your Mac computer to run another operating system (either MS Windows, Linux, DOS, OS/2 or even another flavour of OSX if you like) at the same time your normal OSX is running.

Just like VirtualBox and VMWare, if you want to run MS Windows applications you either need to dual boot your Mac using Bootcamp, or you need some sort of ‘virtualisation’ product.

So – what is Parallels Desktop for Mac?.