Say what you want, but Parallels is not a company that is just sitting on the sidelines watching the cars go by.

Their Mac OS X Workstation product has now reached Beta 4 status. Yes, if you are keeping score at home, that was awfully quick. But here it is. With over 70,000 people beta testing the product, Parallels has been able to enhance the offering with the following:

• Support for full screen mode
• Dual-monitor support
• Improved real CD/DVD support
• Improved, easier to use interface
• Better sound support, including a fix for the Windows 2000 guest OS
• Networking kernel panic fixed
• Bridged networking issues fixed
• WiFi networking issues fixed
• Fixes for some of the issues encountered when entering "Sleep" mode when a VM is running
• And many other minor bug fixes

But the company is not happy with simply getting their Workstation product to market. No, in fact, they are now offering a free beta release of a product called Parallels VM Compactor 1.0, a powerful and easy to use virtual hard disk management tool that optimizes performance of any Parallels, VMware, or Microsoft virtual machine running a Windows 2000, 2003, or XP guest operating system by compacting its virtual hard disk by up to 80%.

By compacting the virtual hard disk:

• it effectively results in better performance and faster disk access
  
• it reduces the size of expanding virtual hard disks to more effectively use real hard disk space
  
• and it creates smaller virtual machine images that are easier to store, move, and share.
  

If you want to give Parallels VM Compactor a try, you can download it here.

Posted by David Marshall on April 20, 2006 08:13 PM